


Keep It Secret (Keep It Safe)

by Defira



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, F/F, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-01-09 09:29:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12273633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira
Summary: In the aftermath of the Star Cabal's secret war against Imperial Intelligence, the survivors are left to pick up the shattered pieces and try to rebuild themselves into something functional. Three women struggle with the weight of the crimes they have committed and the pain they have had inflicted upon them, and duty blurs into love and back again.With the war between Galactic Republic and Sith Empire escalating again, these three women must determine exactly how much they are willing to sacrifice for the glory of Empire...





	1. Termination

**Author's Note:**

> A very early prequel to An Empire's Ransom, explaining the establishment of the Independent Intelligence Institute. Technically, the short story "Faithless" is set shortly before this as well.

_Dromund Kaas, the Dromund System, Outer Rim Territories_

She sat by the window, pulling the shawl tight around her shoulders as she stared out into the rain, watching the lightning illuminate the tall shadows of the citadel. She hadn’t ever been bothered by the cold before, usually more bothered by the humidity that accompanied such storms, but ever since the Star Cabal had reached into her brain and wrenched everything sideways, she’d noticed things that had never piqued her interest before. 

The cold bothered her more readily, a deep and endless chill that had settled over her bones and refused to lift and made them ache from the inside out. Tactile sensations overwhelmed her now- the rough weave on a blanket irritating her within minutes, her crisply pressed uniform sending her reeling into a near panic attack from the constricting shape of it. The thunder, a constant in Kaas City, was no longer a soothing background rumble, instead rattling through her skull like an unattended power drill. 

She was still Keeper, still holding on to the threads of a thousand different secrets and schemes, but it was harder now to keep those threads in hand. She could feel the weight of them like she never had before, sapping her strength, wearing her down, as if gravity was slowly increasing on her shoulders and pressing down with the intention to crush her. Like the tension in the threads had increased a thousandfold, cutting into her hands as she tried to hold on tight, leaving her palms a bloody, ribboned ruin.

How could she be Keeper if she had not the strength to keep hold of her secrets? Of her agents, and her power?

What good was a Keeper if she had nothing left to keep?

She heard the whirr of artificial movement, and glanced over her shoulder to see her constant nursemaid, the medical droid assigned to her ever since her collapse. He fussed endlessly, far more than she saw as necessary, but she was grateful at least for the company. That was an odd thing to yearn for, something she’d never wanted before- company. It’d been so long since she’d prioritised herself over her work that it still felt awkward to have someone relentlessly prodding her towards the former. 

“You are scheduled to rest now, mistress,” the droid said pointedly; if a droid were capable of exasperation, MA-44 had reached that point a long time ago. “Can I assist you in making your way to the bedroom?”

“I’m fine here, Em-Ay,” she said, gesturing to the couch. She tucked her legs up and hid her feet beneath the mountain of cushions, trying not to grimace at the way such a simple action left her drained. 

“Your posture is not ideal for optimized rest, mistress; additionally, there is far too much in the way of mental stimulus in this location. In order to optimize your recovery, I advise-” 

“Thank you, Em-Ay,” Shara said abruptly, feeling smothered by the attention. “I’ll take that under advisement. For now, I’m quite comfortable here.”

There was a subtle clunk of gears that could have passed as the mechanical equivalent of an exasperated sigh. “Very well, mistress,” the droid said. “Please do not hesitate to call for me should you require anything.”

“Thank you, Em-Ay.”

“I shall return in an hour with your medications-”

“Yes, _thank you_ , Em-Ay,” she said sharply, biting her tongue to try and quell the surge of irritation she felt at the droid’s incessant mothering. Her moods balanced on a razor’s edge at the best of times these days, a combination of frustration at her new limitations and fear at finding herself increasingly irrelevant and unneeded. 

And there was anger buried in there too, a deep seated loathing at herself and the Star Cabal and the secretive organisations that had had a hand in creating her. Now she was all but bedridden, clinging at scraps of information from a shattered intelligence network and snapping at her medical droid. It was not the future she had imagined for herself. 

Although truth be told, she wasn’t really in the habit of imagining things for herself. 

The droid didn’t attempt to answer her last snarled response, instead leaving her in solitude with the rain for company. 

And maybe she wasn't quite as comfortable as she'd be in bed, but it was the principle of the situation- she felt so hopelessly out of control in all aspects of her life, it was good to put her foot down defiantly on this one small issue.

It was childish and it was petty, but the small fragments of her pride appreciated the gesture.

She sat and watched the rain, the water sluicing down the glass in a torrent, the flickers of lightning the only illumination in the otherwise dark room. Dromund Kaas was violent and temperamental, but it was home. It was familiar, if nothing else. 

With thunder rumbling in the distance, she closed her eyes and allowed the weariness to take her.

She awoke some time later to the quiet bleating of an alarm, a murmur that was enough to irritate her into wakefulness without jerking her there in a panic. She blinked blearily, still painfully exhausted despite the nap, and rolled her head to the side to eye the datapad sitting on the small table by the couch. The little light in the corner was flashing, and the alarm was quite merrily insistent. 

Grimacing, she rolled awkwardly on the couch, her blanket slipping to the floor as she picked up the datapad and entered her security codes. The bleating stopped instantly, and a message flashed onto the screen.

_Notification of cipher agent termination._

Years of work in intelligence ensured that she didn’t flinch at that message- it was, after all, a message she’d seen on an almost daily basis during the worst times on the job- but a cold vice closed around her chest for a moment when the word cipher caught her eye.

She told herself it was just the exhaustion of the last few months that made her panic, that normally she wouldn’t ever dare to let herself be so entwined in the fate and circumstances of any particular agent, but as she scrolled down and skimmed through the words and realised it was not Cipher Nine listed in the report, an immense weight lifted from her shoulders. She shuddered, rubbing her hand across her eyes in the vain hope it would ease the pain settling into her skull. 

Thessa was not dead- or at least, this particular report wasn’t for her. Which meant that she was, in all likelihood, still alive and still in hiding. And Shara could go another day trying to muddle through why she felt so very personally responsible for the pain inflicted on Thessa, and why the fate of one agent in particular should be so very desperately important to her. 

Swallowing back the lump of emotion in her throat, she flicked quickly through the report; her reading speed had diminished since the attack, and she had to limit her time spent absorbing new information lest it overload her senses again and send her into a near comatose state plagued by skull-splitting headaches and exhaustion. It hadn’t diminished her intelligence, of course, and she’d be damned if she’d let her new limitations dictate how she conducted her life. 

She was still Keeper, and she’d damn well make it count. 

Rubbing wearily at her temple, she reached for her portable holocomm on the table and activated a call. It took a few moments to go through, and when it finally connected after several long droning beeps, Watcher Two smiled tiredly at her from a desk, the image flickering over the holo. 

“You got the report?” he asked without preamble. 

“I did. Cipher Three had been dark for some time now- the report doesn’t indicate who killed him, I notice.”

Watcher Two grimaced. He looked as tired as she felt; he’d picked up a lot of the slack since her collapse. Clearly it was beginning to wear on him too. “No leads, as of yet,” he said, “it’s actually lucky we were on it so quick at all, since his Watcher is- er, I mean, _was_...” He didn’t need to say it, she could guess. His Watcher had been reassigned during the Sith takeover. His Watcher had been killed during the Star Cabal attack. His Watcher had taken the opportunity to vanish during the chaos caused by both events. The options were fairly substantial, and the finer details weren't relevant given that the outcome was the same regardless. “Thankfully he was on a tight schedule for info drops, and he missed his last one- if he’d been completely off the grid, we wouldn’t have known to send anyone.”

“Have we retrieved his intel? Was anything taken?”

“We’re working on getting an extraction organised at the moment, but numbers are a little thin on the ground right now.”

The frustration in his voice was evident, and it was a sentiment she shared. With the dissolution of Intelligence, they’d lost contact with so many deep cover agents and informants that their network was all but crippled- undoubtedly the Cabal had taken the opportunity to move on some of their people, and some would have recognised the radio silence as their chance to slip off the radar entirely. How many agents had fled, and how many lay dead in hastily dug graves? 

The immensity of their losses still made her choke up on occasion, and the rest of the time it left her numb with shock. It was a failure that crippled not only Intelligence, but the entirety of the Empire. She had failed the Empire, when her only duty in life was to serve. 

“Where was he, again? Somewhere in Hutt space?” She reached for the datapad again, skimming through the report to find the detail. 

“Some of the files are still in the process of being decrypted, but it appears he was on Rorak 4, a heavy industrial world with significant ties to the galactic slave market. According to preliminary reports, Cipher Three was our primary contact in Solida Hesk’s corporation, siphoning information on the Makeb mining division.”

She scrunched her face as she dug through her limited memory for the relevance of the name. “That’s the planet the Minister offered to the Dark Council in exchange for resources against the Cabal?”

“The very same. And now we’ve lost the contact that was providing us with the most leverage amongst the sith.”

Shara covered her eyes with her hand, feeling a headache coming on quickly. “This is a disaster,” she said quietly.

“I agree- I was anticipating your call. I had a thought, but I doubt you’re going to be happy about the suggestion I’m about to make.”

“Out with it.”

“Cipher Nine was last known to be only a few sectors over, and she could-” 

There was an instant surge of panic in her stomach. “Absolutely out of the question,” she said immediately, horrified at the way her voice shook. “Cipher Nine no longer exists- the number has returned to our databanks and will be reallocated once Intelligence has the opportunity to recruit viable candidates.”

Watcher Two sighed tiredly. “Sir, with respect, we both know she’d come in if you asked her.”

“I made her a _promise_ ,” Shara snarled, surprised at her own vehemence. “And she did far more for us than can be asked of anyone- she went above and beyond the call of duty, and she has earned this reprieve.”

“Earned or not, sir, we need to ensure the security of the Empire and Her interests, and Cipher Nine is best placed to help us.” He sounded irritable, and she knew she was letting her personal feelings compromise her duty to her work. “More than that, we need to retain that leverage- we both know our lives are at risk with the sith takeover of intelligence.”

“That doesn’t-”

“ _Cipher Nine’s_ life is at risk with the sith takeover- the Dark Council will not allow the woman who defied Jadus to run about freely,” he said pointedly. When she didn’t respond, he sighed, and gentled his tone. “Perhaps she would be more amiable if she considered it a contract? Contact to once again be ceased upon completion of the mission?”

She felt sick, and she could just about remember Em-Ay’s chastisements by rote now; she knew she’d face a scolding when the droid found her in this state. How did one defend against such miserable conflict, though? Cipher Nine had made the same pledges they all had, and her torture and manipulation was no worse than what any of their fellows faced.

At least Thessa had had the option of walking away, something Shara had never had.

She grimaced unhappily. “Let me make the call,” she said finally. “I owe her that much.”


	2. Aftermath

_An X-70B Phantom, Circumtore System, Hutt Space_

The ship was still and quiet as Raina trudged wearily through the airlock from the docking station, the interior dimmed to encourage natural sleeping hours. The droid chirped merrily at her as she staggered past, something about freshly starched laundry, and she absently waved a hand in his direction to indicate she’d heard. 

Thankfully he didn’t follow after her like he did with Thessa; apparently only she was the object of his strange, smitten affection. 

She considered going to the crew quarters, sleeping alone, but the light was on and she could hear Kaliyo’s hard drawl from the hallway, echoed a moment later by Lokin’s softer tone and the flat sneer that belonged to Thake, the peculiar Chiss who followed Thessa about like a shadow and who seemed to be neither an agent _or_ a friend. 

She hesitated; she didn’t necessarily _dislike_ the other woman, but to say they were friendly at all was probably an exaggeration on her part. She certainly didn’t trust her, and the thought of walking into that room and attempting an air of flippancy in the face of what was sure to be a relentless round of questions didn’t appeal right now. Neither did facing Lokin and his far too knowing smile, or Thake and his... anything. 

Besides, if she was truly honest with herself, her heart was aching from the events of the last few days- she was miserable and conflicted, and she didn’t want to sleep alone right now. 

The door to Thessa’s quarters wasn’t locked, thankfully, and she slipped silently into the darkness, accustomed enough to the shape of the room that she didn’t immediately trip over the furniture. As she fumbled about with her clothes, her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, and she could make out the two lumps in the bed, one of whom was buried beneath quite a large amount of blankets. 

She smiled to herself, despite the ache in her heart. Thessa loathed the heat, and while she was willing to compromise about the temperature in the rest of the ship, she was immovable when it came to the state of her bedroom. It was cold enough to raise chills instantly on Raina’s bared skin, and she wasn’t the only one; Vector suffered along with her, far too enamoured with his wife to ever try and bargain for a compromise. The pile of blankets was substantial enough that it looked like he’d attempted to build a nest out of them. There was a joke to be made there, about killiks and nests, but she was too tired to follow through with it.

Raina folded her clothes as carefully as she could in the relative darkness, fumbling about in the drawers for something more comfortable to wear to bed. The shirt she pulled out felt a few sizes too large, and it smelled vaguely like Thessa; she might have held it up to her face for a moment longer than necessary, letting the familiar scent seep into her. 

Not that she’d admit it, really. 

She pulled the shirt over her head, shuffling barefoot and barelegged towards the bed, tugging aside the comforter and easing down onto the mattress, so as not to disturb the others. 

Thessa turned instantly towards her, half asleep as she pressed her face against her shoulder, an arm going over her hip. The immediate trust the action implied, the intimacy behind it, never failed to amaze her- after all she’d been through, Thessa still cringed and recoiled occasionally when people touched her when she wasn’t expecting it. Sometimes she went days at a time unable to bear the touch of another person- and yet she turned so willingly into her, body relaxed and welcoming as she embraced her in sleep. 

It was humbling, to be worthy of such a measure of trust and affection. 

She buried further under the blankets, trying to shield herself against the chill of the air conditioner. Thessa stirred at her movements, and she felt lips pressed almost absently to the spot where her shoulder peeked above the collar of the shirt. 

“Are you okay?” Thessa mumbled, barely intelligible. Her accent, always more pronounced whenever she was tired, made her words slur together even more, and if Raina hadn’t been expecting the question she probably wouldn’t have had a clue what Thessa had said.

Raina rolled over, turning into the waiting arms of the other woman. “Not really,” she said quietly, resting her forehead against hers. She hadn’t allowed herself to cry- she’d barely even given herself the luxury of thinking about what it was that she’d done- but now that it was over the immensity began to press down on her. 

Thessa was warm, and there was a faint red glow visible- a sign she’d opened her eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, and Raina could very well imagine the solemn look on her face, the kindness conveyed in her eyes despite their alien appearance. 

She could feel her lip trembling, the ache in her chest building. “No,” she whispered, her voice very abruptly ragged with pent-up emotion.

When the tears began, it wasn’t a huge outburst- they burned at her eyes long before she allowed them to escape, her breath rasping from between her lips as she fought to keep it all locked inside. She was doing her best to keep her breathing under control, but she couldn’t quite keep a hold on her shoulders, and found them to be heaving and quaking with each pained sob she held back. And her lip was trembling and her chest was aching, and when she felt the mattress shift and felt Vector’s arm around her waist she couldn’t hold it in any longer.

She wept, hollow and angry and grieving for the loss of her father, a man who had put family above duty- something she had not been able to do in turn for him. 

And the small family she had carved out for herself did not ask her to justify her actions, only waited patiently to help her pick up the pieces afterwards. 

She wept, and Thessa and Vector held her until she fell into an exhausted slumber. 

___

When she blinked awake hours later, she and Vector were buried beneath a mountain of blankets, huddled together awkwardly on the far edge of the bed; Thessa, by comparison, was sprawled loose limbed across the rest of the mattress, face down on the pillow without even a light sheet. The room was _freezing_ , but Thessa seemed quite comfortable- she was only in her underpants, the deep blue of her skin otherwise unobscured as she snored gently.

Her breathing was even, for once- a rare enough occurrence these days. Thessa struggled so often with night terrors, badly enough that Raina couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone a full night uninterrupted. Granted, she didn’t sleep anywhere near as much as Thessa, and sometimes her presence in the bedroom felt awkward enough that she’d retreat to her bunk in the crew quarters rather than spending the night with the two of them, so it was entirely possible that Thessa had more quiet nights than she was giving her credit for. 

But watching her sleep peacefully was enough of a novelty that she stopped to marvel in it, watching the gentle up and down of her shoulders as she breathed, and admiring the way the dimmed cabin lights played over her plump curves. Thessa was hardly the picture of the stereotypical secret agent, far from it- but perhaps that’s why she’d been so damned good at what she did.

Except that she’d walked away from that life. 

Raina felt her stomach twist miserably at that, at the fact that she was determinedly forging onwards with her career while Thessa made every effort to break away from her own. Did she think less of her, for what she’d done? 

The quiet comfort of the bedroom was suddenly not such a sanctuary, and she slid carefully sideways and out from under the protective layer of blankets. Vector stirred briefly, obviously well accustomed to waking the moment Thessa began to suffer, but when no more movement disturbed the bed he settled again. 

Raina fumbled with her clothing as quietly as she could in the gloom, not bothering to change out of the sleep shirt she’d borrowed from Thessa’s wardrobe. Standards of dress weren’t particularly high onboard, after all. 

She slipped from the bedroom as quietly as possible, closing the door behind her to let Vector and Thessa sleep while they could. She had no idea if the others were up and about, and the last thing she wanted was for Kaliyo or Thake to go wandering into the bedroom looking for mischief to cause. 

She had no idea why they were even still travelling with them.

The droid greeted her merrily, trailing after her as she shuffled bleary eyed into the main room. Her stomach grumbled unhappily as he listed off the various foods available onboard that he wanted to offer her for breakfast. 

“No food, thank you,” she said, slumping down onto one of the more comfortable chairs along the wall. “Just caf.”

“Certainly, Ensign. I’m delighted to offer you several blends, including Corellian espresso, Belsavis vine-coffee, Rionese Roast-”

“Just caf,” she repeated, cutting him off. Her head and heart were far too heavy for such finicky decisions. “Is anyone else up?”

“Doctor Lokin has been in the medical bay for several hours, and requested that he not be disturbed. Lady Kaliyo departed some time ago with the mistress’ colleague and said not to expect them any time soon in the foreseeable future.”

Small mercies. 

She sighed again, the guilt and the misery creeping in again. “Just caf for now, and then I’d like to be alone.” Thankfully the droid complied, fetching her the drink and chattering brightly to himself all the way back down the hallway as he left her to her own devices.

Raina leaned back, drink in hand, and listened to the quiet hum of the ship. 

The holocommunicator buzzed, and she jerked in surprise. She wasn’t alarmed, per se, but she certainly hadn’t been expecting the noise. She frowned at the holocomm table as it continued to beep, leaning out of her seat backwards to see if Thessa had emerged from her room to take the call. 

The ship remained silent; no one else so much as stirred at the intrusion. 

Sighing, Raina climbed to her feet and wandered over to the holocomm, making a vague attempt to flatten her sleep tousled hair before answering. Stifling a yawn, she hit the transmission button and stepped back into view. 

And immediately stiffened in fear.

“Keeper,” she said, hoping her guilt didn’t sound in her voice. “We weren’t expecting a call from you.”

The woman smiled wanly, and even through the crackle of several billion miles of static, Raina could see how weary she was. “I wasn’t expecting to be calling,” she said frankly. “Is Cipher Nine available?”

Raina glanced past the holocomm toward the bedroom. “She’s still asleep,” she said, knowing it was very likely the truth, and ergo made it less of a lie on her part. 

Keeper sighed. “And now I feel even worse for calling,” she said, a pained expression on her face. “Would it be too much to ask if you could have her contact me when she’s up and about again.”

“She... that might be some time,” Raina hedged, unwilling to commit to anything on Thessa’s behalf. “Is there something I could help with, perhaps?”

“May I ask you an honest question?” At Raina’s fervent nod, she asked softly “Is she alright? It’s been... difficult, not knowing how she is.”

Raina considered her answer carefully, swallowing around the awkward lump in her throat that seemed determined to herald tears; she ignored it. “She sleeps a lot,” she said quietly. Would it compromise Thessa’s safety to tell her superiors that? If they thought her mental health to be a liability? “Sometimes we don’t see her all day. I think... I think she’s still having night terrors, but she tries to hide it. She cries, frequently and without warning, and there’s so much she won’t talk about.”

Even despite the static, Keeper looked visibly upset at the news. “If she came back in, she could get help,” she said. “Better access to doctors, at the very least.”

“You can’t say you find her decision to stay away surprising, Keeper,” Raina said pointedly. 

“I understand her distrust, but when her health is at stake-”

A tiny little flicker of anger began to spark inside of her. “You knowingly endangered her health in the first place, and abused what trust she had in the system to further the Empire’s goals,” she said. “If she chooses to prioritise her own needs now, you can-”

“Easy, Temple, easy,” she said, holding up a weary hand to placate her. “I appreciate your stalwart defense of your mentor- it is heartening to know that our people can still inspire such loyalty, even after everything that has happened.”

Keeper’s ready acceptance of her anger left her feeling abruptly deflated. “Thessa is a woman of admirable qualities,” she said awkwardly, abashed at having her temper pricked so easily. 

Keeper sighed. “That she is,” she said softly, and her tone left little question in Raina’s mind as to the nature of her own admiration for her. “It saddens me to see her reduced to this.”

Another harsh rebuttal bubbled up to her lips, but a moment’s reflection made it fade away. “She and Doctor Lokin have a number of private conversations,” she admitted. “They’ve spent hours locked away in the med bay. I can only imagine that some of their conversations must involve her ongoing recovery.”

“We can only hope,” Keeper said. “Although given both of their backgrounds, I shudder to think of what medical monstrosities they might be concocting together the rest of the time.”

It occurred to Raina that this was the longest conversation she’d ever held with the elusive Keeper- she’d been present during the assault on the Star Cabal, of course, and she’d met the woman briefly just after her transfer to Imperial Intelligence had been approved. Until now, she’d mostly factored as too insignificant for the head of the organisation to pay any heed to her. 

And Keeper had remembered her name- did she remember the names of the support crew of all of her agents?

“But I digress,” Keeper said, dragging her out of her contemplations. “I need to speak to Cipher Nine, but if she’s not available I’ll wait for her call.”

Looking back on it later, she had no idea what could possibly have possessed her to speak so boldly; the only answer she had for herself was that she was so desperate to set aside the events of the last forty eight hours and prove herself useful that her desperation made her reckless.

“If there’s a mission to be done, I’d like to volunteer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thessa's full name is Aranth'ess'anrokini, and although she answers to the pronounciation of Tessa, a more accurate pronounciation of the shortened name would be Th-ee-sah (th like in thank, ee like in sea, sah like in Saturday). Most people pronounce it Thee-saa, and she'll answer to that too. Humans, nobody knows how to talk civilly. 
> 
> (Thake aka Aranth'ake'cspalar belongs to my long suffering husband, and if you've read Interfaction Cooperation, it's the same Thake)


	3. Confessions

_An X-70B Phantom, Circumtore System, Hutt Space_

She had no idea how she was going to tell Thessa. 

Raina disconnected from the call, reeling from what Keeper had asked her to do. She stumbled out of the main room and down towards the crew quarters, ignoring Too-Vee when he tried to offer assistance for the upteenth time. 

On numb feet she somehow managed to make it to her quarters, not tripping over the airlock seals by only the slimmest margins. The room stank of cigar smoke and sweat, and Kaliyo’s bed sat unmade and with an empty bottle lying propped against the pillow, a pair of boots thrown halfway across the room. Lokin’s bed, by comparison, was made up with near military precision, the pillow freshly plumped and giving no indication that anyone had slept in it recently. 

Vector’s bed had not been touched in some time, and the space seemed to have been claimed by Kaliyo’s wardrobe, by the looks of things. Raina wasn’t precisely sure why the woman was even still travelling with them, especially given how much of her time she spent with Thake instead.

Thake’s bed looked like it had recently been set on fire. She didn’t even want to know what that was about. 

With Kaliyo and Thake away, and Lokin ensconced in the med bay for whatever macabre experiments he was performing today, the crew quarters were mercifully empty, and she stripped down with shaking fingers, the cool air in the ship raising goosebumps on her bared skin as she stepped towards the shower unit. 

She let the water run until it was steaming, and she stepped under the spray, resting her hands on the far wall and letting her head droop beneath the water. She closed her eyes, the vibrations of the ship beneath her palms and the warmth of the water on her back slowly easing the worst of the tension from her shoulders. 

It was at least a good twenty minutes later before she could bring herself to leave.

Keeper’s instructions rang through her head as she towelled herself dry; it felt like there was an immense weight on her shoulders, and every breath she drew only made it press down harder. 

She looked at herself in the mirror, and she wasn’t sure she recognised the woman she saw there. There were lines by her eyes that hadn’t been there six months ago, and she couldn’t quite dredge up the bubbly optimism that had seen her through some of the most horrifying and tumultuous events in her young life. 

She looked at herself in the mirror, and she wasn’t entirely sure that she liked what she saw.

With a sigh, she turned away and finished drying herself off, leaving her hair to lay in damp curls against her head as she dressed, lacking the usual pride and precision she might have otherwise taken in her appearance. 

It was a miracle she didn’t just crawl beneath her bunk; going to all the effort of donning her uniform and polishing her boots and belt buckle and straightening her lines and pressing her jacket and taming her hair... it was too much on a day like today. 

And the inevitable could not be delayed forever- she had to tell Thessa about the call from Keeper, and the ensuing instructions. 

Taking a deep breath, Raina smoothed her palms against her trousers, telling herself it was the lingering heat of the steamy shower that had her sweating and not nerves at all, and headed out of the crew quarters to find her captain. 

She didn’t have to look far- Thessa was in a rare good mood, sitting in the cockpit barefoot, a blanket tossed haphazardly over the back of the chair. She’d clearly come straight from bed, her hair still sleep tousled- although given her fondness for cooler temperatures, it was a surprise to see that she’d carted the blanket from the bedroom with her. That was usually an indication of a less than optimal mood change, a warning sign that her depression had flared again, but to the contrary she appeared bright and alert. She had the star map open on a cluster of stars that Raina didn’t recognise, humming quietly to herself as she pecked away at the keyboard, complex navigational equations filling the screen as she worked. 

For all that Thessa claimed her field of expertise as biochemical engineering, there were a myriad of other talents lurking behind her fathomless eyes; Raina felt like, even after a year and a half together, she’d only begun to scrape the surface of her brilliance. 

Thessa really was an enigma- but that was part of her allure, wasn’t it? Never knowing just how many layers she had, finding something new and delightful to marvel at every day. There was very little that eluded her- mathematics, languages, physics, she took to all with gusto. It wasn’t surprising that she had quickly become one of the Empire’s finest agents, only surprising that she had lasted so long without the brutal work crushing the gentle heart that lay behind the calculating mind. 

She looked up when Raina entered the cockpit, and her smile was enough to have her feeling as giddy as a schoolgirl. “I had wondered where you had got to,” Thessa said, her accent so much more refined in the light of day. The way she pronounced certain syllables was quite charming, her voice so very soothing. “I had begun to wonder whether you had absconded altogether.”

Raina smiled and sat down in the copilot’s seat, close enough to be able to watch her work. “I needed some time to myself, to work through some things.”

“Understandable,” Thessa said, not pausing in her calculations. “What you did was tremendously painful, no matter how noble your intentions. No death comes without the burden of future grief and contemplation.”

“ _No_ death?” Raina asked, raising her eyebrow at that. “Surely there are some deaths that we can justify with a clear conscience.”

Thessa’s fingers paused on the keyboard, and she was solemn as she gazed at her. “Each life is the potential for change,” she said. “Each individual rebounds off ten thousand others in a lifetime, impacting the fates of a hundred thousand, no matter how insignificant the impression left. A life spared can continue on, rebounding endlessly, continuing to shape the galaxy. But a life ended...” Her lips twisted unhappily. “That is dead potential. The spark is gone, the chance to shape and mould and shape forever lost. Countless consequences snuffed out.”

Raina blinked in surprise. “I... I can’t say I was expecting such philosophy from you so early,” she said. 

“It’s hardly philosophy- it’s statistical probability. It’s practicality. A living soul can always be set upon a different path. A dead one? Not so much.” 

It was hard not to think that Thessa might be gently admonishing her- she had pleaded with her for clemency, after all, insisting that she need not take her father’s life in order to save him from the sith hounding at his heels. It was a noble thought, but pointless- Raina had spent her life keeping one step ahead of her hunters, living in the shadow of the dark lords. She’d known there would be no shaking them off once they’d caught her scent. Thessa had spent her early years in the Ascendancy, beyond the reach of such relentless fear.

She could never understand, even after having survived the machinations of Jadus and Zhorrid. And it hurt, to have a woman she respected and loved so deeply chastise her for refusing to entertain a dream that could never come to fruition. 

“He did not suffer,” she said quietly, forcing herself to speak tonelessly, lest she betray her hurt. “It was more than Darth Darrok would have allowed him.”

She could feel Thessa’s gaze on her. “We can take comfort in that,” she said gently. _We_ , she said, not _you_ \- as if she viewed it as a grief that had struck at both of them, as if her heart had broken with her. “Death comes for us all, in the end, and he had in you a loyal and loving daughter. When there must be an end, at least you were there to offer it with mercy.”

Raina took a shaky breath, blinking away the tears that had sprung up in her eyes. “I did what needed to be done,” she said, still feeling the need to defend herself. She still felt raw, vulnerable, and she didn’t know that she wanted Thessa to see her like that. 

There was an immense sadness in Thessa’s features, a grief in her fathomless eyes that hurt all the more for the fact that her eyes were so hard to read most of the time. “We always do what needs to be done,” she said softly, a hundred lifetimes of pain hidden in those few small words. “That’s what we do, as agents.”

She gestured, and Raina barely hesitated before crossing the cabin to her side. Thessa held open her arms to her; she did not need to speak to offer the comfort Raina needed. The chair gave her an extra few inches, and she had to kneel beside her, pressing her face into Thessa’s shoulder and relaxing against her, feeling her arms come around her and her lips brush against her hair.

She was warm, her skin several degrees hotter than her own, and she smelled both alien and familiar- she wasn’t human, after all, and there was something subtle in her body odour that lingered as a reminder of that. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, per se, merely a reminder of how strange and wonderful Thessa was, and a quiet confirmation that she was safe and loved. 

She ran her fingers carefully over her bared shoulder, dancing lightly over each freckle that was dusted over her rich blue skin. 

Her parents had risked love and family under the watchful eye of Imperial Intelligence, and she knew neither of them would have traded it for anything in the galaxy. To spend her days here, with Thessa and Vector- the allure was strong, to be sure, but things were so very different. Imperial Intelligence was gone, and Keeper’s message was all but confirmation that the sith lords would soon be taking a much more personal interest in the workings of Intelligence. Thessa (and to some extent, Vector too) was an alien in an Empire unfriendly to aliens- it didn’t matter that the Chiss were allies rather than conquests, or that her people had contributed a great deal in the way of knowledge and military might. The Empire prioritized humans and sith, and she would always be viewed with disdain and suspicion. 

Her parents, two humans, had done their best to build a life together, and it had still ended in years on the run and the eventual death of her father. 

Trying to imagine that things would end any better with Thessa and Vector seemed like a fool’s hope, and yet...

“Are you coping a little better this morning?” Thessa murmured, her lips close to her ear and her fingers gentle where she ran them down her back. 

A fool’s hope. “Keeper contacted the ship,” she said, blurting it out without thought. She pulled away from her, away from her warm embrace, and climbed back to her feet, taking a step backwards. She felt like she had betrayed her just by taking the call, and she wanted desperately for Thessa to accept the news without question.

Instead, Thessa hesitated. “Did she now,” she said casually, not even a question. “I suppose it would be far too optimistic to assume she just rang for a friendly chat.”

There were any number of warnings in her body language- the careful way she held herself, the sharp and straight lines of her shoulders, the way she was so very careful in her pronunciation. She was alert and on edge, despite her attempt to sound casual- but Raina could not say whether it was the calculating instincts of a hunter, or the frightened response of cornered prey. 

She had seen Thessa as both, and sometimes the lines between hunter and hunted were so very blurred with her. All that was obvious was that she was tiptoeing along the edge of violence, and she was afraid. 

Raina didn’t blame her. 

“I was under the impression that Keeper had agreed to allow us a period of radio silence,” Thessa continued, not looking directly at her, “if not indefinite freedom.”

Raina took a deep breath. “Cipher Three has been confirmed as deceased,” she said, the words spilling out in a rush. “Keeper has asked that the death be investigated.”

Thessa stared at her, no discernable reaction to the news on her face. She glanced away, a muscle working in her jaw as she considered her words, then looked back. “I really should be surprised, but it’s consistent with our abysmal luck,” she said finally. “Did she give any indication why she wanted us to investigate?”

“Time was a critical factor in the report, and we are the closest asset in the area.”

“With all the chaos in the last few months, why is it so crucial that they investigate the death of one agent?”

“The report indicates that my fath- I mean, Cipher Three was funnelling information from an crucial Hutt operation in this sector. Keeper means to use the information as leverage against any disciplinary action the sith might choose to take against Intelligence.”

“What are the Hutts up to that could possibly be that important?”

“I don’t know- it’s some sort of mining venture, and the Cartel is throwing billions of credits into it. Whatever they’re up to, its far reaching, and it could mean the difference for the Empire in the war.”

Thessa breathed out slowly, her brain clearly working several steps ahead. “And you agreed that I would investigate?” she asked, her disapproval evident in her tone.

“Actually, I agreed that _I_ would investigate,” Raina said quickly. “Keeper has agreed to accommodate your request for privacy, and this mission is to be my trial by fire, as it were. Should I perform adequately, I will be given the designation of cipher agent.” 

Her words were met with a painful silence; Thessa would not look at her, instead staring down at the computer terminal before her. The awkwardness grew, fear nibbling along the edges, until Raina had to bite her lip so as to not beg Thessa to speak, to promise her that she wasn’t angry or disappointed or upset with her. 

Finally Thessa sighed, tugging the blanket onto her lap. “Is anyone aware of your family connection?”

“To the best of my knowledge, no.”

“And have you considered the fact that this might actually be a trap?”

Raina bit the inside of her cheek to keep from retorting angrily. “Of course I have- I would be foolish not to anticipate it.”

“I don’t mean to cause affront, Raina-” 

“We can’t keep flying forever,” Raina said pointedly, deliberately changing the subject. “We can’t keep running.”

Thessa’s cheek twitched slightly, and she turned her face away. “No reason we can’t. It’s my ship, after all.”

“But what about our careers? What about families? You couldn’t raise a family on-”

“Nobody’s asking you to stay!” Thessa said sharply. She took a loud intake of breath, as if her own outburst had surprised her. “I would never ask any of you to stay beyond your own comfort levels. You know that my heart and my home will always be open to you, but I will not force you to stay.”

Raina waited a few beats. “And what if I want a life with you, beyond this?”

Thessa ducked her chin, quite pointedly turning her shoulder slightly to close herself off to her. “I cannot be the woman you want to spend your life with in that regard,” she said, over pronouncing her words in an effort to keep a lid on her emotions. “You still have so much potential in you, and I...” She breathed out slowly. “Well, I do not.”

“But that’s not true,” Raina said immediately. “You’re a brilliant scientist, a vastly talented woman, and you-”

“And I am stating very clearly, as earnestly as I can, that I do not want to be the woman you want me to be.” It could not have hurt more if she had struck her. “You are ambitious, and you still have the potential for a career, and the glory you perceive to lie down such a path not only does not interest me, but actively repulses me.”

“Thessa-”

“I love you, Raina,” she continued, “and I know you care for me. But I can’t be sure that it’s not simply the idea of me that you love, and not the person I am now.”

Raina took a breath and held it.

“Take the mission, Raina- but I’m not going to wait for you in the meantime.”


	4. Accusations

_Dromund Kaas, the Dromund System, Outer Rim Territories_

“I assure you, Em-Ay, I do not need to be constantly mothered as you seem to assume,” Shara said, standing before the full length mirror and making last minute adjustments to her uniform. She frowned at the braiding that ran from her collar and down towards the breast of her officer’s jacket; the damnable thing didn’t want to sit straight at all. “And actually, attending an audience with a sith lord with a nursemaid in tow will do little to encourage them to keep me on.”

“Your physical health and wellbeing should not be taken for granted,” the medical droid said; they had established a pattern in the last few weeks, bickering like an old married couple and inevitably reaching an uneasy truce where neither of them was entirely impressed with the other. “If you are to continue in your role as Keeper, you must be in peak physical condition.”

“And if I am to continue in my role as Keeper, I can ill afford to lie about indoors when there is work to be done.” 

“Estimated chance of increased exhaustion and susceptibility to pain as a result of working beyond advisable time frame currently at seventy two point eight eight percent and rising.” If a droid was capable of nagging, Em-Ay had perfected the art. 

“Then revise my schedule within the new expectations of my abilities.”

“Inadvisable. Current levels of exhaustion likely to lead to further permanent neural net weight decay and tissue damage.”

Gritting her teeth, she closed the wardrobe and turned away from the mirror. “And in the eventuality in which such a preposterous turn of events come to pass, I will make use of the extensive medical facilities at my disposal in my recovery.” She breezed past the droid. “In the meantime, I have work to do.” 

The droid followed her all the way down the hallway towards the balcony, expressing dismal projections for her failing health every step of the way. She waved it away in annoyance. “I’ll take it under advisement,” she called over her shoulder, with no idea what it was precisely that she’d agreed to in the first place. A shiver passed over her skin as she stepped out into the brisk morning air. The sun hadn’t managed to make an appearance yet, but that wasn’t unusual. 

“I shall call ahead to ensure you are adequately attended to on arrival,” Em-ay said, clearly dissatisfied with her responses so far. 

“If you insist,” she said, climbing down into the driver’s seat of the waiting speeder.

“I shall monitor your vital signs remotely.”

“Fine by me.”

“Ensure that you maintain a consistent temperature, and regulate your fluid intake. Do not expose yourself to extremes of temperature or-”

“Goodbye, Em-Ay!” She should have felt bad about cutting the droid off like that, leaving it standing sullenly on the landing pad, but instead she felt nothing but relief. The cloying, obsessive nannying was smothering her badly, and she was frustrated at her constant feelings of weakness. 

It was poor form to take her anger out on a simple droid in such a childish fashion, but her options were severely limited these days.

The sky was grey and muted, and the air was cold and sharp. Against the advice of Em-Ay, she kept the top down on the airspeeder, letting the damp cool rush over her skin as she sped through the narrow gaps between the luxurious skyscrapers. It had rained constantly through the night, no surprise there, and the humidity had not had a chance to take hold of the day yet. 

For now it was cool and crisp, and she revelled in it. 

There was only a single guard on duty on the landing pad outside the former headquarters, and he only cast her a cursory glance as she pulled to a stop. There were puddles all across the entrance, something that would have been an act of negligence punishable by death only a few short months ago. 

It was a spit in the face, a sign of yet again how far they had fallen in so short a time. The building was only a few weeks away from beginning to look dilapidated, but she had neither the time nor the manpower to invest in maintenance. 

Instead she gritted her teeth and nodded sharply to the guard, who straightened nervously when he recognised her; she walked briskly into Intelligence headquarters, head held high, as if nothing had changed at all. 

Even though everything had. 

Her footsteps echoed in the sparsely populated halls of what had once been Imperial Intelligence; the Star Cabal had been ruthlessly thorough in their war against them, and it was only thanks to Thessa’s stubborn refusal to lie down and accept her fate that any of them had survived at all. Once bustling corridors sat dark and empty, centuries worth of records and data stripped and destroyed; they were still coming to terms with the loss, struggling to recoup with their limited numbers and resources. 

How much of the devastation could be attributed to the Cabal, and how much could be laid at the feet of the sith- blinded by rage at imagined betrayals and insubordinations- remained to be seen. It was possible they’d never truly recover from this. 

She couldn’t allow herself to believe the sith would so aggressively sabotage themselves, because she couldn’t imagine a world in which Imperial Intelligence was not a cornerstone of the Empire’s strengths.

She didn’t want to imagine a world in which she, a woman designed and enhanced specifically for this work, was no longer necessary.

No longer wanted. 

The building was not abandoned, despite how it looked at first glance. As she followed familiar twists and turns, there were lights on in the occasional office, and the hum of computer terminals rumbled underfoot. Coming into the main hall was still devastating, to see a room that once controlled the fate of entire worlds and systems half in darkness, with only a dozen or so figures wandering through the gloom. 

The overhead monitors and radar scans showed a planet she wasn’t immediately familiar with; as she walked across the chamber, her entrance attracted the attention of the few loyal staffers. A few saluted her wearily, and one or two nodded in acknowledgement. 

At least one stared blankly at her, before deliberately turning away. 

She couldn’t really blame them for their resentment- Intelligence had collapsed under her watch after all. But she couldn’t afford to allow their dissent to go unchecked, either.

She made a note of everyone’s response, and filed it away for further consideration. 

Watcher Two looked up tiredly from the topographical map projection he was studying; this close, it was obvious he hadn’t slept in some time. The dark circles around his eyes looked like bruises, and his skin and hair were greasy and unwashed. His uniform, at least, was relatively presentable, but she had to wonder what exactly he thought he was achieving by continuing to work in such a state. 

“Watcher,” she said, preempting anything he might have wanted to say to her, “you look like you’re running on fumes.”

He smiled wearily. “You’re not precisely wrong in presuming I’m only running on _chemicals_ ,” he said pointedly, rubbing at his eyes. 

“When was the last time you slept?”

“I’d sleep if there was someone to stand in for me while I was off duty,” he said, and she bit her tongue to keep from arguing. She’d held the same toxic work values for so long now, and even though it had hurt her more than it had helped her, she couldn’t fault him for it. It wasn’t the sort of mindset one could escape from easily. 

She sighed and rubbed wearily at her eyes. "I'm working on it," she said. "If I can garner favour amongst the Dark Council, we may be able to begin recruitment again as early as this financial quarter."

"About the Dark Council..."

"Yes, Darth Marr and Darth Arkous should be arriving in the next hour- please have them shown to my-"

"It's not that." His eyes flickered nervously to the space over her shoulder, and she felt her heart stop in fear. 

“Greetings, Keeper,” came a deep and rasping voice from behind her; there was a _presence_ at her back, a cold space that made her shiver and made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. “You’re _late_.”

Adopting the most neutral expression she could, keeping her hands loose against her sides, Shara turned to face her guest. He was relatively young, by sith standards, and went about unmasked. But his youth did not detract from the cruel beauty in his face, the hatred that burned in his unnatural golden eyes. 

She had encountered him only a handful of times in the past, and none of their meetings had been pleasant. 

“Lord Darrok,” she said, swallowing down the worst of her terror. “Forgive me, I was not expecting you- I was under the assumption that the Dark Council would be-”

"Then presuming you know the ways of the sith was your first mistake for today," he said, his voice booming through the hall. Most of the remaining agents kept their gaze deliberately averted.

Shara felt a flush of heat in her cheeks, shame and fear blossoming across her face. "My Lord, I assure you, it was nothing more than an attempt to anticipate your needs and best prepare to accommodate you. Had I known-"

"Had you known, you would have attempted to twist and manipulate me to further your own interests," he said, then laughed cruelly. "You must think us foolish indeed, to think we would allow a cancer such as this to grow beneath our breast unchecked."

She ducked her head. "I would not presume to make any such assumptions, my Lord."

There was silence, heavy and painful, for a few long moments, and then she heard him grunt in displeasure. "Your spineless cronyism does you no favours," he snarled, and he walked close enough behind her to bump her aggressively with his shoulder. She stumbled forward a step, taking pains not to make a sound of protest at all. "Take me to your office- I wish to speak to you beyond the prying eyes and ears of your minions."

She swallowed down the spike of fear in her throat, bile stinging at the back of her mouth. “Of course, my Lord,” she said, proud of the fact that her voice did not waver even once. “If you’ll follow me?”

The hall was silent as she led the brooding sith lord towards her office; Darrok walked so close on her heels that it was a wonder he didn’t step on her ankle and trip her. Worse, she could already feel the ache building in her limbs, the draining exhaustion that made her hands tremble and her feet wobble. She clenched her hands into fists at her side, and prayed fervently that he would take the gesture as one of frustration, and that he wouldn’t sniff out the weakness in her. 

The door to her office slid shut behind them, the seals hissing as it closed, and she tried not to wince. 

Darrok didn’t speak immediately. Instead he prowled past her, first over to her desk to paw through the files and data chits stacked haphazardly about, and then over to the control console. She bit her tongue to stop from telling him to stop, trying to keep track of the buttons he jabbed at so that she could reset everything later. 

Stars only knew what he was doing here; Darth Marr and Darth Arkous were due any time now, and she couldn’t afford to get caught up in internal sith politics. She scoured her memory desperately, trying to recall Darrok’s lineage- did his Master sit on the Council? 

“You disappoint me, Keeper,” he growled suddenly, and she jumped; his voice was more and more bestial with each word he spoke. He stalked the room as he spoke, violence and power unwillingly contained in a mortal form; he was an animal, a predator, and never before had she felt so much like prey cowering in the face of such rage. “Your name implies that you are to be trusted with keeping safe the secrets of the empire, and yet you cannot even keep your own people in line.”

She bowed her head demurely. “I assure you, my Lord, that we are working with all haste to restore our network to its former-”

“I did not ask for your assurances!” he snapped, the force of his voice enough to have her fringe blow upwards momentarily. The sound echoed around in her head, ringing in excruciating pain, and she dug her fingernails into her palms to stop herself from moaning. “You are a failure, and your mewling does nothing to endear you to me. You are _pathetic_.”

She stared at the ground, doing her best to control her breathing. “As you say, my Lord.”

He grunted angrily, stalking swiftly past her and over to the desk again. He picked up a file, and made an elaborate show of activating the datapad and thumbing through each screen. “There are rumours,” he said, his tone far too pleasant for her to feel safe. “Whispers that Intelligence might in fact be hiding things- things that rightfully belong to the Empire.”

Shara swallowed down her terror. “My Lord, if you suspect Intelligence of anything, you need only say and we will root out the source of the disquiet.” 

“Are you suggesting, Keeper, that I am incapable of hunting out treachery myself? That I cannot smell it on you from a thousand yards?”

“I would not dream of it, My Lord- I merely sought to spare you the tedium of wading through such mediocrity yourself.”

Darrok paused, and she held her breath. When he moved again, it was with a sense of a cat parading about proudly after having been gifted a bowl of fine avian meat. “Your attempts to assuage my suspicions are pathetically transparent,” he said, gliding past her, close enough for the hair on the back of her neck to stand on end in fear. “But I appreciate your candour.”

Her appeal to his vanity had worked, it seemed, and she breathed out slowly, doing her best to relax. “I only live to serve, My Lord,” she said, hoping she was not pressing forward too far with the sycophantic impression. It was a delicate balance with a sith, and every Lord was different. Some appreciated the fawning and grovelling, while others demanded only fear and terror- and even that could change in the space of a moment. 

“You are a liar, and a poor one at that.” He sighed dramatically, like a father expressing disappointment in an errant child. “I shall give you one chance to redeem yourself, or you shall join in your predecessor’s fate.” 

The Minister for Intelligence. James Besson. Loyal servant to the Empire for almost fifty years, now sitting unmourned and unacknowledged in a filthy prison cell on some unlisted world. “Tell me what you would have me do, and it will be done.”

He moved quickly, faster than she could to escape him, and he was standing before her before she had a chance to prepare herself. He put a finger beneath her chin, turning her face up towards his, and she fought the cringing shudder of revulsion that rolled over her skin at his touch. She mustn’t have hidden the fear in her eyes though, her mask slipping, because he chuckled. His breath rolled over her face, stinking of rich spices and rot, and she felt her throat seize up.

“Tell me, Keeper,” he said, his voice smooth and soft, “did you think we would not notice Intelligence hiding Force sensitives amongst your ranks?”

Shara felt her stomach turn to stone. “If it is the case that the Emperor’s edict has been disregarded by anyone under my care, I take full responsibility-”

He struck her, his hand cracking across her face hard enough to send her flying to the floor, lights blinking in front of her eyes; she slammed into the cold marble, choking as the impact winded her. Her body’s pain response was delayed, her system reeling in shock as adrenalin pounded through her. 

“You pathetic _worm_ ,” he snarled, and that was all the warning she had before she was enveloped in white cold power, electricity crackling through her in ever increasing waves. She wanted to scream, but her mouth had seized shut, all of her muscles locked in immense, searing pain as bolts of lightning shot from Darrok’s fingertips and into her flesh. 

She wanted to scream, she wanted to fight back; she wanted to crawl away and hide and have nothing more to do with the _bloody_ sith for the rest of her short life. She just wanted to damn well _move_ , but her body was locked in a hellstorm that she couldn’t escape from. 

When it finally stopped, when the sharpest of the pain cut off abruptly, she sucked in a breath to her tortured lungs, tears on her face. Darrok was standing over her, his mouth moving; she couldn’t hear him even if she cared about what he had to say- her ears were ringing so painfully that she had to wonder if she’d ever recover her hearing properly again.

_Concentrate_ , she told herself fiercely. _You are better than this_. 

She stared at his mouth, brow creased as she tried to focus through her tears, and eventually through diligence she was able to awkwardly make out his words. 

“Do not disappoint me, Keeper,” he said, straightening his gloves as he stood over her. He glanced at her in disgust when she sobbed particularly sharply, as if she were a bug or a piece of shit on the sole of his shoe. “You have not given me a great deal of optimism so far, and I am not a patient man.”

He stepped over her, deliberately nudging her with his boot as he did so; it could hardly be considered a kick, but with her body already wracked with pain it was as if he had laid into her with nailed shoes. 

Her vision was blurry, and she could taste blood on her lip- had it come from her nose?- and for a moment she entertained a desperate desire to just let the pain overtake her, to let the exhaustion and fear and agony win out so that she could just close her eyes and escape.

But she was a Keeper, and she would not give up so easily.

She lay on the floor, panting and twitching, as the pain fired down every nerve ending in her body. After what felt like an eternity, but was in all likelihood only half a minute, there were footsteps in the doorway; there was a gasp, and a moment later Watcher Two was kneeling at her side, his face pale and pinched. 

“Keeper, are you-”

“Get me an adrenalin stim,” she rasped, her throat raw and bloody from the abuse. 

“Sir, you’re in no state to work, I’m calling for your medical droid to-”

She grabbed him by the collar and dragged him closer; he clearly wasn’t expecting such a show of strength from her, and nearly went toppling over. “Get me an adrenalin stim, and don’t tell the droid,” she snarled, although the burst of strength left her almost as quickly as it had come, and she let go of his jacket to droop against the floor again. “We have work to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who couldn't place Darrok, he literally only has two lines in one of Raina's friendship cutscenes, she shows the agent a holo of the sith responsible for hunting down Force sensitives running from their duty to attend Korriban. He's a useful villain.


	5. First Trial

_Rorak 4, the Rorak System, Hutt Space_

Rorak 4 was just as she’d left it several days ago- hot, unreasonably grimy, and imbued with a stench that seemed all you needed to communicate the despair and greed and hopelessness of the planet. The space port was busy as always; as a major hub for the galactic slave trade, as well as an influential industrial world, the cities of Rorak 4 rarely slept. 

Raina had barely slept either, to be honest. 

She’d traded in her neatly pressed uniform for something a little more discreet, wearing an old patched pilot’s jacket hanging open so that her gun belt was clearly visible. Her boots were scuffed, the laces knotted and worn, and before she’d left the ship, she’d had Lokin help her apply a complex false tattoo across the left side of her face and neck. Her skin was still stinging slightly, but the complicated whorls and lines ruined the symmetry of her face quite effectively, and if she was caught on any security cameras, it would prove a lot more difficult for facial recognition software to identify her. 

The flight planetside hadn’t been too bad, and thankfully this sector was busy enough that she’d been able to buy a seat on a different passenger ship to the one she’d taken several days earlier; it’d be the worst thing imaginable if she was to be recognised by a crew member before she’d even made it to the surface. Rorak 4 attracted all types, but two visits less than a week apart would be noticeable enough that it might ruin her cover. 

Who knew who else might be watching, other than Intelligence? Keeper had been rather frank with her emphasis on the need for speed and discretion, implying that the information Cipher Three had accumulated could make or break the future of the Empire. 

Her stomach twisted miserably and she rubbed at her aching cheek. She’d assumed after all these years that her father’s duties had tapered off, that his usefulness to Intelligence had lessened the longer he’d stayed underground in an attempt to stay a step ahead of his sith hunters. How was she to know that the information he’d accumulated- corporate espionage, at that- would have such dire consequences for them all?

It was all snowballing beyond her control. All she’d wanted was the opportunity to serve the Empire to the best of her abilities, and that would never have been through the Sith Academy. She’d heard enough about that institute to know she wouldn’t have survived, and what good was she if she lay dead and unmourned under the blade of a rival acolyte? She had done so much good for the Empire in her work with the Ascendancy, and again under Thessa’s guidance- how could they possibly look at the work she had done and see her as a traitor, defiler of the Emperor’s commands?

She just wanted to do good. She wanted to build the Empire into something mighty and glorious. Surely her ambitions should be celebrated, not derided?

She pressed her head to the window and closed her eyes, trying to ignore the worst of the turbulence as they descended through the smoggy atmosphere and down to the industrial world.

Her ID chit held up through customs- a freelance agent hired by an anonymous third party to inspect and purchase slaves wasn’t exactly an unusual visitor to a place like Rorak 4- and she ambled out of the space port without much obvious purpose, walking closely to the back of a group of Neimoidians who were haggling angrily over the price of a group of cathar slaves. 

Raina bit the inside of her lip and tried not to listen to the details. 

She took a public speeder down towards the commercial sector, jostling for space with every breed of alien she could possibly imagine- and some she couldn’t-, holding her breath against the rancid body odour of at least one of her closest neighbours. The city streets far below them seemed to shimmer and dance, a combination of the thick chemicals in the air and the heat trapped below the clouds, and she closed her eyes against the nausea building within her. She alighted one stop early, desperate to be off the crammed platform and onto more solid ground.

Standing in the mouth of an alleyway, hands on her knees as she breathed in shakily and tried not to throw up, it occurred to her that perhaps she’d lived too long on Hoth. Rorak 4 wasn’t even that bad as far as air pollution went- most people went about without a rebreather- but in comparison to the icy clear air of Hoth, or the carefully filtered air of the Phantom, it was already making her chest feel heavy and her throat feel raw. 

Or maybe it was just miserable nerves making her feel ill, caught between the rock and the hard place that was her loyalty to the Empire and her increasingly desperate attempts to hide the crime of her own existence. 

Her father had lived in an apartment complex in one of the mid-sectors, not wealthy enough to warrant the wealthier penthouses that had questionably majestic views over the grimy cityscape, but not awful enough that he was confined to the bowels of the city, with no hope of seeing the sun. It was something, at least, some small sliver of comfort that his life had not been entirely ruined by his years on the run. 

_He was an agent- this would have been his life regardless of whether he was protecting you or not._

It was a mantra she’d been repeating for days now, trying to keep herself from breaking apart out of grief and guilt. 

The speeder port had been crowded, and the alleyway she’d chosen to catch her breath in had been adjacent to some wretched sort of drinking hole, the raucous sounds of cheering spilling out into the street over the sound of some kind of sportsmatch being screened inside. It seemed too skeevy for the neighbourhood, a touch too crowded with sinister types, but what on earth did she know- this was an industrial world, built on the back of slavery and corporate corruption in the free trading abyss of nepotism and greed that was Hutt space. Maybe that sort of place- crowded with slavers and hackers and bullies and bland office workers spinning the immense wheels of galactic commerce- was exactly what suited this neighbourhood.

She hadn’t made an effort to look around much last time she’d been here, but she found herself glancing at it nervously as she passed- had her father ever spent his evenings there, trying to relax over a cheap drink and a game of Huttball? Putting on a friendly face and making contacts, keeping his ear to the ground for trouble? Or had he held himself aloof, kept himself secret- easier to stay invisible when no one remembered his face. 

Getting off a stop early meant that she had several blocks to go to reach his apartment complex, but it gave her a chance to blend with the crowds and keep an eye out for any tails she might have acquired in the meantime. If this truly was a trap by the sith, their assassins could be anywhere; she had seen them lurch out of nothing but shadows to sink their glowing blades into unsuspecting prey, and it made her shiver as she glanced at the seething shadows in the streets that ebbed and flowed with the flickering neon lights. 

But she couldn’t falter. She couldn’t give any reason to have the crowds around her suspect her of anything suspicious- well, anything more suspicious than one would suspect in a place like this. 

So she sauntered along with purpose, her gait lazy and her hands tucked deep in her pockets, as if she hadn’t a care in the world and the accumulation of low-life lurking in the doorways she passed was of no concern to her. 

The walk to her father’s apartment took about twenty minutes, and even if she didn’t necessarily loiter, she made an effort not to look particularly rushed. She couldn’t afford to attract attention. The streets were less crowded the further she drifted from the main avenues, and she felt eyes on her more than once, the back of her neck prickling with the weight of their gaze. Nothing felt particularly hostile though, so she didn’t risk glancing back.

The stairwell was just as filthy as she remembered, with the rank stench of urine wafting up from below; she scrunched up her nose and kept climbing, keeping her hands securely at her sides. There was no way she was touching the hand rail in a place like this. The graffiti on the wall was interesting, however, and there were a few gang symbols that she stopped to scan discreetly, to study at her leisure later on. The door was a little stiff when she reached the right floor, and she had to hit the doorpad three times to get it to budge; even then, it didn’t open all the way, and instead ground to a halt about three-quarters of the way open. Grimacing, she eased through the gap, and out into the hallway. 

The corridor was slightly nicer than the stairwell, and some of the apartments actually had signs of life. A door mat here, a name plate there, a pair of shoes left beside a door. Coloured ribbons hanging above one door, some species’ household protection ritual, and another had alien letters painted on in a spiral. It was very normal, and it broke her heart to know she’d been the one to disrupt this tiny sanctuary with her crimes. 

She scanned for lifesigns as she went, sending out a scrambling field that would disable any electronic devices in the vicinity; no unusual readings came back, and she hadn’t found any evidence of listening devices on her last visit apart from the ones her father had installed. Apart from her visit, Cipher Three had gone entirely unnoticed.

The doorpad was hanging slightly askew, the scratches on the metal evidence of where it’d been pried away from the wall with a blunt instrument. Raina didn’t know whether to scowl in professional disapproval at their sloppy handiwork or be thankful that at least someone had gone to some effort to check on her father. 

Whatever wires they’d tampered with in order to gain access to the tiny apartment rendered her override chip somewhat useless; but where technology failed her, a touch of the Force could usually be relied upon to see her through.

There was something horrifically fitting about using the Force to break into her own father’s apartment, given that he’d died for hiding her limited gift from the Sith in the first place.

With a frown of concentration and a wave of her hand, the door opened with shuddering reluctance, enough so that she could squeeze through the gap and into the darkened apartment. It was not how she’d left it, showing obvious signs of ransacking. Her father had always been an immaculate man, and she’d made certain to leave him as dignified in death as he had been in life. Whoever Intelligence had sent to investigate had clearly decided to see what sort of a profit they could make as payment for their trouble- the desk drawers had been left hanging open, datapads and datachips lying scattered across the floor, neglected, and one of the two chairs in the tiny apartment was upended. 

There were clothes torn from the cupboard, and the doors in the tiny kitchenette were all left wide, whatever food they’d once contained long gone. 

She didn’t look towards the bed, couldn’t bring herself to do it; instead, with clinical efficiency she unhooked her bioscanner from her belt and proceeded to take a recording of the room, inch by meticulous inch. She of course had removed all trace of her presence before she’d left the first time, so she had nothing to fear, but she still had to observe the formalities. She was here to investigate a murder, after all, and she had to make it look like she’d gone to every length to uncover the killer. 

He’d lived so humbly, such a nondescript life- was there truly no one to mourn him, no one to question his passing? If he hadn’t been funneling important information back to Dromund Kaas, would his death have gone completely unnoticed?

Unlike her first visit, she was meticulous in searching for all of the usual tricks to expect from an agent- she went along the floor, checking the seam between the wall and the floor for hidden caches. She went between the two rooms, tapping the walls and testing for hollows, trying to find a secret package he may have plastered behind the wall. She ran her hands over the underside of the furniture, checking for switches, and then through the kitchen cupboards. 

All the while, she never looked towards the bed. 

It was in the refresher that she finally had a breakthrough- the faucet rattled slightly when she ran the water, something that would probably be considered completely normal in an apartment of this calibre. For any agent, however, it might as well have been flashing neon. 

She’d taken off her gloves while inspecting the seams on the furniture- the better to feel any discrepancies that might indicate a hidden compartment- and she carefully pulled them back on again; the last thing she needed was to be electrocuted by a leaky faucet and a crude security trap. With extreme care, she eased the faucet head off, setting it aside before unscrewing the base of the tap. As she pulled it away from the sink, there was a small clatter, and she looked down to find a small metal stick lying in the basin.

A dataspike. 

Taking a towel from the railing beside the sink, she carefully picked it up and dried it off. Holding it up to the light, she turned it over in her hand, inspecting it with no small measure of bitterness. Intelligence didn't care that a good and loyal man had died here- they only cared about this.

With a sigh, she went back into the main room to recover her gear bag, pulling out her modified datapad that she used for field work. It blocked any outgoing transmissions, and while that meant she couldn't access the most up to the minute decryption tools if the information was locked, it did mean it wouldn't send out the electronic equivalent of a flare in the night, alerting anyone who might be a threat to her of what she was doing or where she was, or potentially causing the file to trigger an autowipe.

She could accept the limited resources if it kept her off the grid.

Plugging it in and holding her breath, she clicked on the files as soon as they'd run through the firewall. As expected, a stream of numbers and letters in both aurebesh and several other languages began scrolling down the screen, and she set to work. A standard alphanumeric encryption- even with the unknown integers from a third or possible fourth language- shouldn't prove too difficult. It was the sort of thing they covered in basic training. She started by cross-referencing it against the few standard Imperial encryption sequences that had been approved for use in the last few decades, and she found a likely hit within about ten minutes. 

She frowned, concentrating hard, as she tried to determine the numeric key code that would trigger the decryption cascade. “Come on,” she muttered, pacing absently back and forth as she tried to coax it out. 

“Might I offer a suggestion?”

She _screamed_ , spinning around with her heart in her throat and her blaster in her hand. She was shaking, the laser point on the gun bouncing around wildly as she sought out the speaker in the dark gloom of the apartment. The red spot landed on an arm, and she followed it up to a shoulder, and then-

She stared.

Doctor Lokin smiled, kind and soft and completely nonthreatening. “I apologise for startling you,” he said, from where he sat at the dinner table in the one chair that hadn’t been upended in the mess. His hands were folded in his lap, and his smile was genial and bland. 

She wasn’t fooled for a moment. “How long have you been here?” she asked, her voice shaking. He was a Fixer, he was a clean up crew, Fixers always came in to clean up the worst messes, Fixers were _assassins_.

He made a noise of consideration. “Oh, perhaps twenty minutes? Half an hour?” He chuckled, and the sound made her skin crawl. “You were very much lost in concentration, not an ideal habit in an agent determined to keep on living.”

“What do you want?” she snapped, waving the gun at him. “Are you here to kill me? Are you some sort of judge, to see how I do as an agent? Are you here to deal with a traitor?”

He held up a hand mildly. “So many accusations, my dear,” he said, “calm yourself-”

“I’m afraid you are making that decidedly impossible at the moment.” 

Lokin sighed. “Might I offer a suggestion?” he said again, gesturing to the datapad.

She glanced down, scowling in confusion. “What do you mean?” she asked suspiciously. 

“For the decryption process. I assume you’re struggling with the base algorithm code?”

She hesitated. “Maybe,” she said. Was this a part of the test?

He smiled warmly. “Have you tried your birthdate as a single integer?”

Raina laughed incredulously. “Have I _what_?” she asked, well aware that her voice was verging on hysterical.

“Your birthdate as a single integer, Imperial Standard Calendar.” 

Her blood ran cold- he _knew_. He knew that Cipher Three was her father, and that she had murdered him in cold blood. “Why would I do that?” she whispered, horror leaving her frozen in place like a stone. She’d killed an Imperial Agent, and a _Cipher_ at that, and there was only one name for a person like that.

_Traitor._

Doctor Lokin’s smile never wavered. “Because,” he said, “that's the sequence code that the three of us- your father, myself, and James-, agreed upon as a contingency in the event of his death, over twenty years ago now.”

Raina felt her entire world shift sideway. “You knew my father?”

“Knew him? My girl, he was one of my dearest friends. We were inseparable when we joined Intelligence.” His smile widened. “And now, in tribute to your father, you're going to help me with a little project of mine.”

“I’m... what?”

“Nothing too troublesome, I promise you.” She swore she could see the shadow of a rakghoul’s maw in his smile. “We’re going to break James out of his sith prison.”


	6. Domesticity

_An X-70B Phantom, Circumtore System, Hutt Space_

“Love?”

Thessa looked up from her calculations, smiling as Vector entered the cockpit. “Hello, love,” she said, holding out her arm so that he could walk directly into her embrace. She let out a sigh of contentment as he came to a stop beside her, hands in her hair while she rested her head against his belly.

For a few moments they stood in silence, his fingers slowly weaving through her hair and her eyes closed as she let herself relax. 

“Your aura is clearer today,” he said into the quiet. “Are we to take it that you are feeling better?”

She leaned back, arms looped around his hips as she looked up at him. “It's always a better day when we have the ship to ourselves,” she said. She didn't say ‘ _good_ ’, because she was not yet at a point in her recovery where she could have ‘ _good days_ ’. 

“The silence is invigorating, in its own way,” he agreed, his hands still playing gently with her hair. “There is a richness to it, and story that cannot be found except in the silence between the stars.”

Thessa smiled tiredly. “And Raina said I was sounding remarkably philosophical today,” she said.

Vector returned her smile, bending down slightly to kiss her on the forehead. “Did you have an opportunity to speak to her about..?” One of his hands slipped down to her shoulder and then lower, coming to rest on her belly. She hesitated, and that was answer enough for him. “You will not be able to hide it for much longer, love.”

“I’m well aware of that,” she said miserably.

“We simply do not want to risk losing you both. After Corellia, it was our deepest fear that you-”

“Please don’t mention Corellia,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes tight shut. Her skin prickled uncomfortably, as if anticipating the pain of the electric batons all over again. She still woke screaming some nights, convinced the sheets twisted around her legs were the ropes they’d used to bind her; more often than not, she fled to wake Lokin in tears, begging him to run the tests again.

Every time, he complied with a gentle smile and a calming voice, talking to her about something or other that he’d read in a recent scientific journal, or the most controversial news from the opera scene, or even his mishaps in the lab. Random, run of the mill conversational fluff, that inevitably calmed her and left her shivering with spent adrenalin as he ran the customary scans.

 _It's alright_ , he'd always say, with a hand on her shoulder. _You're both perfectly safe._

Vector was standing silently before her, his fingers toying with her hair. Sensing perhaps that she has roused again from the dark places her memories had taken her to, he rubbed her belly gently. “We could not bear to lose you,” he said quietly. “It breaks our heart to think of you putting yourself at risk-”

“I’ve resigned, darling,” she said, putting her hand over his. She liked to imagine that she could feel movement, that the first kick would come in a moment like this, when they were alone and at peace, something infinitely priceless to share just the two of them. “I’ve sent in my file. I’m not going out on any more field missions.” 

He shifted slightly, enough to cradle her head against him, and she relaxed against his warmth. “Will you consider joining the diplomatic corps?” he asked. “Or do you still wish to serve Intelligence in an administrative position?”

She smiled against his belly. “At the moment, I would very much like to take the next few months or years off of work entirely,” she said. “The prospect of full time motherhood appeals to me quite a lot, I find.” 

“And after that?”

His insistence at digging for a more long term answer left a vaguely sour taste in her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said, leaning back to look at him again. His eyes were dark and fathomless, like there were entire galaxies swimming in the depths if only she’d look hard enough. “I don’t really think it’s something that needs an answer right now, does it?”

He sighed. “We just find ourselves worrying,” he said. “We had no need to contemplate the future while we were one with the nest. Our future was as our present, and it was satisfactory.”

She grimaced and turned away slightly. “Is it no longer satisfactory, to contemplate a future with me?”

“Love.” He put his hand under her chin and turned her back towards him, and although his eyes were unreadable, black and inky and infinite, his expression was so heartbreakingly sincere that she felt her breath catch in her throat. “We would sacrifice all the happiness and security that we have found in the nest for you-”

Her heart lurched, and she sat up quickly. “No!” she said, a flutter of panic in her veins. “No, no darling, please. Don’t do that.”

“We would. For you.”

“And I want at least one of us to have that sense of certainty and contentment with who they are.”

His brow crinkled, as if he was frowning in confusion. “You are still determined not to return to the Empire,” he said, not a question so much as a reluctant conclusion. 

She took a deep breath. “Vector-”

“We do not blame you for your misgivings, of course- you are right to need time to heal, and time to recover.”

“Vector-”

“It is simply our concern for you and our child that prompts our query, love.” He ran his hand over her belly again, and oh how she wished that she could feel the sense of surety that he felt. “If you do not wish to return to the Empire, do you wish for us to make a home with your people?”

He’d do it, too- without a moment of hesitation, he would walk away from everything he had built for the killiks, simply because she wanted him to. He’d already tried to offer it once before, repressing his link to the hive out of a desire to make her happy. She’d told him then that she had no intention of taking away such an integral part of him, that nothing about it distressed her in the manner he feared it would. And that was still true- marriage hadn’t changed that, and the Star Cabal hadn’t changed that, and even pregnancy hadn’t changed that. 

However...

Her mouth twisted unhappily. “We cannot make a home with my people,” she said quietly. She ducked her head, too ashamed to look him in the eye. “They would not...”

“They would not accept me,” he finished for her, and she cringed. “We know, love. There are chiss who have joined the song, and we still consider ourselves to be a diplomat in service of the Empire. It would be remiss of us not to know the dominant cultural ideologies of our most prominent ally- and that of our wife.”

She hid her face against his chest. “Then why did you suggest it?” she whispered miserably.

“We wanted you to know that you had the option of returning home, should you desire it.”

 _Without me_ , he didn’t say, but she heard it nonetheless. 

She clung tighter to him. “I can’t do this without you,” she said, voice shaking. “And I don’t just mean the baby. I mean- all of it. Vector, I can’t-”

“Love,” he said gently, his expression solemn as he peeled himself out of her arms and knelt beside her. He took both of her hands in his. “We firmly believe that you are the most capable and most accomplished individual we have ever had the pleasure of knowing. To love you and to journey with you is an honour.”

She blinked away tears. 

“We know without a doubt that you will thrive in whatever challenge you face, whether we are there or not-”

She felt a surge of panic at the mere implication that he might not be there at some nebulous point in the future. “I _can’t_ , Vector,” she whispered, desperately hoping he understood the meaning behind her pleas. 

“But,” he continued softly, reaching up to touch her cheek softly, and as he drew his fingers away wet, she realised she had in fact been crying. So much for attempts at stoicism. “We will never leave your side unless you specifically direct us to. We promised you this, and we will never disrespect you so much as to break a promise to you.” 

She burst into tears, and he took her into his arms, murmuring softly to her as she wept. He had been, in so many ways, the light in the darkness of the last few years for her, and despite his declarations of confidence, she had no similar confidence in herself, and no guarantee that she would have survived without him by her side. The things she had endured, the things she had done, desperately trying to convince herself that it was for the greater good... it horrified her in ways she could not ever truly express. 

She had always told herself that she was doing it for something bigger than herself, something more important than her life and her needs- it was for every child who faced the spectre of this unending war, every parent who had to outlive those very children when the war took them from them. It was for every single person who could not, for whatever reason, defend themselves against the debilitating and terrifying fallout from the war. She didn’t necessarily believe in the Empire, or in the infallibility of the Sith- but she had no deep love for the Republic either. She had always believed first and foremost in science, in the beauty of finding meaning and order in the galaxy around them, and the opportunity to join with Imperial Intelligence so many years earlier had seemed the perfect excuse to further her travels and witness sights that she would never have the chance to experience had she stayed on Csilla. 

She believed in order, and she believed in the biological inferiority of less evolved species, and she believed that the Force was simply a manifestation of a easily explained metaphysical phenomenon, no more mysterious than the various methods in which different species could detect sound waves, or smells. 

Or rather, she _had_ believed in those things. After a decade away from Csilla, she didn’t know what she believed anymore, and finding herself faithless after being so utterly invested in her beliefs was perhaps just as devastating- if not more so- than some of the physical trauma she had endured.

How did one go back to a people and a culture that was so defined by their isolationism, their blatantly xenophobic belief in racial purity? After having seen the brilliant anarchy that the galaxy had to offer, how could she go back to a home that wanted her to deny that brilliance? 

And what was the alternative- stay with a political ally that had openly and repeatedly tortured her, in the name of upholding the status quo? Or join the slowly collapsing quagmire that was the bureaucratic mess masquerading as a democracy? The Empire hated aliens and pretended to respect chiss, but the Republic hated chiss and pretended to be respectful of aliens while looking the other way when it came to slavery and genocide and any number of other ethical monstrosities. 

Once upon a time, she had been inclined to overlook the ethical and moral violations committed by the Empire, convincing herself that their frank honesty on the matter made them more tolerable than the Republic’s hypocrisy. What she had learned instead, during her time with Intelligence and then during her nightmarish stint serving under Ardun Kothe, was that the situation was far more complex and far less black and white than what she would have assumed had she never left Csilla. The Empire’s bleak honesty and openness would never, ever make their racism and their cruelty more bearable, and the Republic was a disorganised shitstorm that was rotting from the inside out, but the initial tenets of equality and safety were still there in the core of it all. In the Republic, she was told she was equal, and then asked to prove it. In the Empire, she was told she was lesser, and asked to accept it. 

Both were exhausting. 

She was so lost in her own disastrously circular thoughts that when she next dragged herself out of them again, she was back in bed. The lights were dimmed to a pleasant glow, and the air in the cabin was deliciously cold, enough that she could see her own breath coiling in front of her as she exhaled. There was a warmth at her back, and as she shifted on the mattress, she felt movement. “Love?”

She winced as she rolled over awkwardly, her joints aching as if she’d been curled up asleep for days. “How long was I out?” she asked hoarsely. 

Vector was sitting in bed beside her, his back against the headboard and a datapad in his lap; unlike her casual apparel, he was firmly rugged up against the cold, with his feet in heavy woollen socks as his long legs stretched out before him, and a riotously coloured scarf draped around his neck. He reached down as she rolled to face him, brushing her hair away from her eyes. “Not long,” he said gently. “An hour at most.” 

She rubbed at her eyes, and the awful grainy feeling that came from napping in the middle of the day. “That’s not so bad, I guess.”

“The gestation period is likely to increase your fatigue,” he said, resting his palm on her forehead. “Do not berate yourself for needing the rest, love. The stars will still sing for you when you wake.”

She closed her eyes, enjoying the warmth of his hand against her cool skin. “No comments on my aura?” she asked, only half teasing. 

“It is calmer. The greens and blues of the ice. The purple of the storms. Colours muddied, not clear.”

“In other words, I’m calm just because I’m exhausted.” 

She heard him chuckle; she loved his laugh more than any other sound in the universe. He was not prone to extravagant bouts of mirth, so every laugh of his was a treasure to her. “Perhaps,” he hedged, not confirming it one way or the other. “We are simply relieved that you are comfortable again.” 

There was a rattling in the doorway, and she rolled slightly to look over her shoulder; Too-Vee was there, bearing a tray holding two mugs and a bowl piled high with-

She levered herself onto her elbow. “Lotus chips?” she asked, her mood brightening.

“Oolian lotus chips, acquired directly from Ascendancy traders during our last port visit, Master,” Too-Vee said cheerfully, marching into the room. “As well as Tenupan black tea, Gold Label, sweetened with honey.”

“ _Gold_ label?” She fumbled to sit up, and Vector helped her. “I’ve never even seen Gold label outside the Ascendancy, not even in Kaas City in the Csillan Quarter.” 

“No hardship is too great to undergo in order to ensure that my dear Master has access to the finest of produce. Oh, I would give my optical processors if it ensured your happiness, dear Master-”

“Please don’t do that,” she said quickly, patting the bedside table for him to set down the tray. 

“It would be but a small, temporary inconvenience, Master, and I would gladly endure any-”

“Too-Vee,” she said, a little more firmly this time. “Do not. Under any circumstances. Sell pieces of yourself to purchase things for me.”

“But Master-”

“No buts,” she said, waving a finger warningly at him. “Consider that an order- please update your permissions folder to specify that I do not allow the sale or trade of any parts of your...” She waved ineffectually at him. “Body.” 

If it was possible for a droid to deflate with disappointment, Too-Vee did just that. “As you command, Master. I pray that this will not severely limit my ability to provide you with the best possible-”

“Too-Vee,” she said wearily, “enough. Please.”

Once the droid had left them to it, loudly lamenting his woeful predicament as he clacked down the hallway, Thessa settled back against the pillows with help from Vector, clutching the precious beverage in both hands. She breathed deeply in the steam, sighing happily. “Have you ever smelled anything so wonderful before?”

Vector chuckled softly, carefully sitting back with his own beverage. “Our appreciation is possibly not so extensive as your own,” he said. “Although we did appreciate the various flavours and nuances when you took us to that Csillan tea ceremony, last time we were in Kaas City.”

Thessa shook her head. “They weren’t even serving Tenuban Gold there, this is leagues ahead. I have no idea how Too-Vee managed to acquire a whole box.” She paused, the mug halfway to her lips. “Oh, I do hope he didn’t kill anyone.”

“We are quite certain that is not the case, love.”

Nodding absently, she finally took a sip, almost melting as the hot, vaguely spiced beverage hit her tongue. It was so rich and sharp, perfectly offset by the sweetness of the honey, and with a single taste she felt as if she was back home again, standing in the elegant stone halls of Csilla. Too-Vee had even brewed the tea with glacial water, bless him, and she could feel the cold in her veins sing with the memory of the ice.

“Is it satisfactory?”

She realised at some point that she must have closed her eyes, and she opened them sheepishly to find Vector watching her, a warm smile on his face. “It is,” she admitted. She glanced down to the datapad, still held on his lap while he held onto his mug with the other. “What are you reading?” 

It was his turn for his smile to turn shy. “We were reading a translated compendium on assorted chiss child-rearing practices,” he said quietly. “We of course have the knowledge of the nest to draw upon, but... we wanted to learn, for our own sake.”

If she loved him any more, she might possibly be overwhelmed by it. “Oh?” 

“Specifically, we were reading a treatise on naming conventions, and the evolution of triparite system.”

“That’s some particularly dense bedroom reading, love- I didn’t know xeno-linguistics and etymology was a source of interest for you.”

He chuckled shyly. “We were, ah...” He glanced at her. “We were trying to determine how our child’s name would be structured.” 

Ah. That right there, that was quite overwhelming. _Our child_. “Oh,” she said, setting her mug down on the bedside table again and then turning back to push herself into a better sitting position. “Well, ah, there are two elements that are determined from birth- the name of the House, or family, and what we would refer to as the core or raw name. It’s a hard concept to explain in Basic, the raw name, especially as it’s exceedingly impolite to refer to someone with that name alone.”

“How does one select a core name?”

She shrugged. “The same way any parent chooses a child’s name- they like the sound of it, or it’s in tribute to someone.” She glanced at him. “How do killiks choose names? 

“They are palindromes- and we suspect that it would be rather impossible for a chiss name to be palindromic.” 

An idea formed in her head. “Well, their full name, no- but there’s no reason their core name couldn’t be a palindrome.”

He lit up as though she had offered him the complete history of the killiks since the dawn of their race. “You would consider that acceptable?” he asked, his voice so hopeful and hesitant that it made her heart break. So much of who he was had been rejected and condemned and slandered by people he had once considered friends and loved ones- she knew how much it meant to him to see her embracing this part of him without misgiving. 

She reached up, touching her fingers to his face. “I would,” she said quietly. “I would consider it a privilege, for our child to share both of our cultures.”

He turned and kissed her fingers. “Thank you,” he said, just as quietly.

Thessa took a shaky breath, suddenly quite emotional. “I love you.”

“We love you too, dearest. With all that we are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone who has read Empire's Ransom, Thessa is pregnant with Demi (Aranth'ede'miurani)


	7. Reminiscence

_Rorak 4, the Rorak system, Hutt Space_

Raina wasn’t quite sure what was more bewildering- Lokin’s calm declaration that she was going to help him break a prisoner out of the highest security sector of a sith prison, the fact that that prisoner was none other than the disgraced Minister for Intelligence himself, or the bold claim that he and said Minister had once been her father’s dearest friends. 

Well, obviously her father must have had friends at some point in his life, clearly he had to have been adept at personal relationships to some extent given that she had memories of happier days in her childhood before her Force powers had manifested. Laughter and gentle teasing between her parents, these were not the signs of a man who shunned all other contact with the world. Of course he would have had friends other than her mother, and certainly before she’d come along and disrupted their lives. His world had not begun and ended with her, after all.

Just ended. 

Lokin had not spoken again while she stewed in her own panicked thoughts, his smile genial and patient. She’d always found him to be polite but unsettling as a member of Thessa’s crew, and she’d never thought that their relationship was ever going to advance beyond work acquaintances. How wrong she was. 

She swallowed down the ugly lump of nerves in her throat. “You knew my father,” she repeated again, still trying to comprehend the immensity of that relatively simple statement. 

He didn’t laugh at her for her struggle, but simply nodded. “We were all in the same class for our mandatory military service when we were young,” he said. “The Officer’s Club, everyone called it for a laugh. All the very finest and most prestigious families were represented, the cream of the crop, so to speak.”

“I don’t understand.”

Lokin clasped his hands together between his knees, leaning forward ever so slightly. “You bypassed the academy entirely, correct?” His gaze was far too shrewd. “Your father arranged all of your schooling with private tutors, and when the time came for your period of mandatory service, he made extensive arrangements to see you placed directly in the service of a chiss diplomat, instead of letting you step foot on the grounds of the academy where your first and only medical assessment would have determined your Force sensitivity.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Everything, my dear,” he said. “It was only through the connections that he made as a member of The Officer’s Club that your father was able to keep you safe in the first place, and bypass the laws put in place by the sith. It was through The Officer’s Club that he met your mother, and it was through The Officer’s Club that-”

“Alright, alright, I get it,” she said, already flustered by the way he seemed to be so gently patronising her, as if he thought her simple. “It’s not for the enlisted soldiers, I get it.” 

“Many a grand career is made or broken by the class. It’s rather difficult to make it to the rank of Moff without having graced the halls of The Club, as I hear these days.” 

This was possibly the most absurd conversation she’d ever taken part in- standing in her dead father’s bedroom, with his body behind her on the bed, holding a datachip that could make or break the economy of the Empire, while a man who was half rakghoul tried to explain the politics and social climbing of Imperial military ranks. She felt decidedly light-headed. “I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this,” she whispered. 

He gestured to the upended chair beside him. “Why don’t you take a seat, my dear,” he said. “You’re looking a tad queasy.” 

“I don’t _want_ a seat,” she said, her voice verging on shrill, “I want _answers_.” 

He considered her carefully for a moment, before sighing sadly. “Very well,” he said. “There were five of us, originally- James, Eleanor, your father Reth, your mother Winnie, and myself.”

Raina crossed her arms, telling herself sternly that she wasn’t hugging herself. “I don’t- I don’t know who Eleanor is...” 

“I daresay you do- perhaps under the guise of Empire Ellie?” 

She felt her eyes widen, and her jaw slowly drop. “Do you mean to tell me that my parents knew Empire Ellie?” she said incredulously. “The holo star?”

He smiled fondly. “As I recall it, Eleanor and Winnie were rather inseparable throughout our years in the academy. They created Wampy the Wampa during a late night cocktail session back in our first year.”

Raina felt her knees wobbling, and slowly sank down onto the edge of the bed behind her. “My mother invented Wampy,” she said faintly, not quite able to wrap her head around the sheer ludicrousness of the situation she found herself in right now. 

Lokin’s chuckle irritated her immensely, for some reason. “Your mother was an expert in propaganda dissemination and psychological warfare,” he said proudly. “Winnie had a way with words- and music, and art, for that matter. She was an artist of the highest calibre.”

She slumped forward, her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. “I know what you’re doing,” she said, from between her fingers.

“Beg pardon, my dear?”

“I know what you’re doing,” she repeated, sitting up again; he hadn’t once dropped the smile. “You’re trying to manipulate my emotions. You’re lulling me into a false sense of security, trying to forge an emotional connection with me by reminiscing about my parents, so that you can then turn around and manipulate me into doing your dirty work.”

The smile didn’t move at all, but it seemed sharper. More volatile. Dangerous. “Is it working?” he asked pleasantly.

“No!” she spluttered, lurching back to her feet. “Stars, at least have the decency to speak to me like a colleague, like an equal, instead of a wayward child!”

He spread his hands wide, his expression that of a parent choosing to impatiently tolerate a toddler’s tantrum. “I am simply-” 

“Stop it. Are you here at the behest of Intelligence, to assess my performance? Or are you here just to blackmail me?”

Lokin finally climbed to his feet, hands still spread wide. “I admit, I am open to either possibility,” he said slowly. “It has not escaped my notice that your trial for Intelligence would be met with far more enthusiasm were it overseen by and endorsed by a senior officer. It behooves you to accept the mentorship of a member of Intelligence when offered.”

“I would prefer to earn my place on my own merit,” she said, her voice slightly hoarse as he drew closer.

“A sensible, if somewhat vainglorious approach.” He stopped before her, and for the first time his eyes left her face, flicking past her shoulder to the bed behind her. A shadow of something- grief, perhaps- passed over his features. “And perhaps I wanted to take the opportunity to say goodbye to an old friend.”

The guilt and the shame surged within her, and she ducked her head. “How long?” she asked quietly. 

“The whole time, my dear. I knew you as a baby, and you are the spitting image of your dear mother when she was your age. Sometimes when I catch you out of the corner of my eye, I’m transported forty years into the past, and then I remember.”

She bit her lip, her eyes burning with tears. 

“They called us ‘ _The Imperial Five_ ’. Three ciphers, a watcher and a fixer. We changed the course of the war a dozen times over- and we thought ourselves to be immortal.”

“Please stop,” she whispered shakily.

Lokin cleared his throat, a slight tremor to his voice when he spoke again. “Of course, that was a long time ago. Before your mother’s illness, before Eleanor fell pregnant, before James got wild political aspirations that put him in the firing line against the Dark Council.”

“Before you went and performed incredibly reckless and unsafe eugenics experiments on yourself,” she said. 

He actually laughed. “And now you sound just like your father,” he said, with a wistful sort of fondness that just made her feel worse. He was quiet for a moment, and when she could bring herself to look up again, he was looking past her to the bed. “He seems peaceful,” he said softly.

Raina closed her eyes tightly. “I made it as easy for him as possible,” she whispered.

“Tell me.”

She swallowed down the lump in her throat, struggling for a moment to keep her tone even. “I used a somniject during supper,” she said, “and by the end of the meal, he was struggling to stay awake. He blamed the wine.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“He was- confused. I... I think he knew, but he kept apologising.” She knew she was crying, the tears falling silent and hot onto her cheeks, but she wouldn’t sob. A senior agent had asked her for a report, and she would give it if it killed her. “I helped him to tidy up, assured him it wasn’t a problem.”

He didn’t say anything.

“He passed out at the table,” she whispered, “and I- I got him to the bed with some difficulty.”

“A somniject would not kill him,” Lokin said.

This was the hardest part. “I took epinephrine from your medical supplies. Induced a cardiac arrest, to make his death look natural.” 

_To give the sith hunters no trail to follow_ , she didn’t say, but he had to know. He’d know her from birth, he’d know her parents in their youth? He had to know that her father had died because of her wretched secret.

Lokin was silent for a very long time, and when he finally moved, he did not speak as he stepped past her to the bed. She bowed her head in overwhelming shame, brushing the tears from her cheeks as she tried to get a rein on her traitorous emotions before she tried to face him again. What sort of agent was she, whether she truly held the rank or not, if she couldn’t even keep hold of herself in a tense situation? What if she was to face torture by enemy forces? Thessa had borne herself through such immense pain with such powerful grace, weathering each blow thrown her way with dignity and poise that made her love her as much as she envied her for it. 

When she finally turned around, Lokin’s face was unreadable, and he had a medscanner in his hand as he stood over her father’s body. It was the first time she’d allowed herself to look at him- or rather, the empty shell that had once been Reth Temple. She hadn’t seen her father in many, many years prior to the other night, and it was abundantly clear to her that the years had not been kind to him. She remembered how badly her mother’s death had aged him, how he’d gone from seeming to young and vibrant to almost grey and exhausted overnight, but this was another fourteen years added weight on top of that. He still had a luxurious crop of thick, curly hair, but there was grey scattered liberally throughout. His skin was wrinkled and tired, and she wanted to say that the pallor to his colour was simply the result of death, but she couldn’t really remember how he’d looked the other night other than tired. 

He’d just seemed... sad, more than anything. Tired and extraordinarily sad, when she’d arrived to end his life. Not quite grateful in the end, but she liked to imagine he was relieved. Glad that the lonely vigil without Winnie was over, glad that he had protected his daughter for long enough that she had stood up to determine her own path, she wasn’t sure. She had plenty of fantasies about it, though, plenty of whimsical, desperate little ideas that she’d clung to in the hours since while she’d tried to convince herself that she’d done the right thing. 

“Next time you need to carry out an assassination,” Lokin said, interrupting her train of thought, “please do ask me before helping yourself to my supplies.” He was in the middle of shining a light into her father’s cloudy eye, and for some reason it roused a panic in her.

“Is he... is he not dead? Did I do it wrong?”

Lokin made a few notes on his datapad with his stylus, carefully easing Reth’s eyelids down again. “Oh no, he’s most certainly dead,” he said. “But the active ingredients in a somniject cause significant slowing of the body’s metabolic rates, some of which work to counteract the effects of chemicals such as epinephrine or norepinephrine.”

She stared at him. 

“It means, if you hadn’t gotten lucky with the dosages, the somniject would have prevented the epinephrine injection from working. It would not have induced a fatal heart attack, as you so hoped.”

She felt sick. “Did he suffer?” Oh, stars, had she fucked this up that badly?

He shook his head. “I am quite certain that he was heavily sedated enough that he never woke again,” he said quietly. “I will adjust the pharmacological reports in the autopsy so that there is no suspicion that is was anything other than a natural and tragic accident.” 

Raina hugged her arms to herself, staring miserably at her father’s body. “You can do that? Isn’t that... illegal, or something?”

“My dear girl,” he said, somewhat distractedly as he continued typing, “everything we do is ‘ _illegal, or something_ ’. That is the entire purpose of the Fixers- to come through and fix everything that needs to be corrected, whether it’s for the sake of the general population, or whether we are altering the mission reports in a manner that allows both our field agents to continue operating, and our administration to justify our activities to the sith and the politicians.”

She let the words sink in as he worked, the bleak horror of it. “I thought Fixers were just assassins,” she said quietly, after a time.

“We can be, when the situation calls for it. But we are diplomats, when we need to smooth things over, and doctors, when things go badly. We are accountants, able to balance financial systems so as to ensure our presence never goes noticed, and we are, well, cleaners. When the worst occurs.” 

“Does Thessa know the Fixers commit fraud? Or treason, by obscuring intelligence data?”

Lokin looked at her, and the glint in his eye made her feel sick. “Why do you think I’ve been travelling with her for so long?” he asked, amusement in his tone. “A high ranking Cipher needs a Fixer around, or they can’t do their job.”

Stars. She’d had this grand idea that everything about being an agent was brutally glamorous, like a gilt edged knife, but this... all of this. It was tedious, and ugly, and mired in bureaucracy. It was painful and anxious and here she was second and triple guessing herself on literally her first mission out. And Thessa did all this, her parents had done all this? Fraud and treason and twisting the truth to stay one step ahead of their own people?

“I will be a few minutes more with this toxicology report, my dear, so why don’t you use the encryption on those files like I suggested?” 

She wiped awkwardly at her face with her sleeve, the brief flash of tenderness from the tattoos enough to make her wince. She didn’t exactly want to look at her father’s encrypted files, because she was dealing with quite enough guilt as it was, thank you very much. She didn’t exactly want to trek through the arduous task of compiling her father’s intelligence notes into something legible right now, but what other choice did she have? Stand about awkwardly and stare at Lokin as he examined the mess she’d made of her father’s murder?

Picking up the datapad from where she’d dropped it when he’d surprised her, she went back into the sequencer and held her breath as she input her birthdate as a single integer. She felt her stomach lurch unhappily when it actually worked, just like he’d promised.

 _Father_. He’d risked such a critical operation on such a damnably simple key sequence. No one was supposed to know he had a family, but... anyone who did know would surely have guessed their relevance to his security measures sooner rather than later. 

Anyone in this case being his own daughter, and a man who claimed a brotherhood with him that transcended death. 

She frowned as she began to take in the numbers trailing down the datapad, the sheer immensity of them taking a moment to absorb. “What on earth did you uncover, father?” she murmured, flicking the screen down to follow the numbers as they kept building. 

Slaves purchased and shipped out in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands- enough to make the work sites of the dark lords themselves look positively pleasant in comparison. Redirecting almost all of the funding for the Research and Development Division of the mining company into classified projects that all seemed connected to a master file. Immense numbers of financial backers with ties to the Hutts. Over and over again, the files seemed to point towards one possibility- that the Hutts were planning to launch themselves onto the galactic stage of war as a viable third opponent. 

Raina jumped in alarm when a hand landed gently on her arm, lost in the numbers; Lokin smiled apologetically. “Now, a little tip for you my dear- in our line of work, we would call what you have in your hand there leverage.”

“Leverage?” she asked in confusion. “This is literal evidence of militarization in a prelude to war, how can-”

He held up a hand. “Have the sith- and most importantly, the Dark Council- been humiliated by their losses over the last few months?”

“... yes?”

“And has Intelligence been defunded and broken up by those same sith out of a belief that they are, as always, superior in their knowledge of all things?”

“Yes?”

He smiled. “So the sith would be looking for a way to look in control once again, rather desperately one would imagine, and Intelligence rather desperately needs to be funded and provided with adequate resources in order to serve.”

“Are you suggesting that I should _blackmail_ the Dark Council with this data until they fund Intelligence?”

“Oh good heavens, I would never suggest such a thing,” he said, but the smile never wavered. “But as your mentor, and- dare I say- as your friend, I am certainly implying it strongly.”

“I can’t-”

“You absolutely can,” he said sharply, his eyes glinting with something savage and terrifying. “If you won’t do it to help me free James, then do it for your father- do it to avenge the man who was hounded and hunted and forced to sacrifice his family and his happiness by the sith he served so faithfully. Do it for _yourself_ , Raina.”


	8. Broken Promises

_Dromund Kaas, the Dromund System, Outer Rim Territories_

The soft bleeping of her alarm dragged her rudely from sleep, and Shara groaned into her pillow, hoping the damnable thing would simply tire itself out and stop. The beeps seemed to grow more shrill with each passing second, blaring in her head with all the subtlety of an airstrike siren. She pressed her head into the pillow, desperately hoping for unconsciousness to take her again, but no such luck. 

Rolling over onto her side took an immense amount of effort, and she had to rest for a moment once she was done, her heart hammering against her ribs and her breath thin in her lungs. Lifting her hand towards the bedside table was a struggle again, shaking violently as she struggled to find the strength to hold it. She fumbled around in the dark, trying to grip the damned comm, and it was only the sound of Em-Ay clacking loudly down the hallway towards her room that made her get her elbow under her enough to grab it firmly.

She fell back against the pillow with an exhausted huff, the comm gripped firmly in her hand. “Keeper here,” she said hoarsely, pressing her other hand to her forehead. A shadow fell over her from the doorway, as Em-Ay came to a stop with his hands on what passed for his hips, clearly displeased with her sleep having been interrupted.

“Apologies for waking you, Keeper,” came a female voice, one she did not immediately recognise. She scrunched up her face, trying desperately to concentrate on her memories to dredge up a name. One of the junior analysts? Was it... Fixer something? “But we’ve got an emergency on our hands.”

“We always do,” she mumbled, pushing herself back onto her elbow even though her whole body screamed at her to stay in bed. “Status report.”

“We’ve had top priority communications come through from Ilum- Darth Malgus has led a coup attempt to break away from the Empire.”

The urge to sink back into the bed and let the mattress swallow her whole was almost crippling. She had never felt so utterly hopeless and exhausted as she did in that moment, not even when the Star Cabal had seemed likely to triumph over them all, not even when the Republic had sent their Jedi Battlemaster into the heart of Imperial space to attack the Emperor directly. She’d always had safety nets, whether it was the Minister himself or the unspoken comfort she’d drawn from Cipher Nine’s presence. Now she was utterly, completely alone, in so much pain that death honestly seemed like a delightful reprieve right now, and this catastrophic turn of events was now solely hers to weather. 

She was alone on the high wire, with no net below her. 

With gritted teeth, she pushed herself fully upright, her head spinning. “Give me the rundown,” she said, waiting until her body didn’t feel like it was trying to kill her before shuffling to the edge of the bed. 

“We’ve only preliminary reports from the ground teams at the moment, sir, but Darth Malgus broadcast a proclamation of intent about twenty minutes ago, local time. Taking into account the minor delays for the transmission to reach us, and that the coup was well and truly in progress by the time he announced it publicly, he has about a two or three hour head start on us.”

“Mistress,” Em-Ay said, stepping forward to help her balance when she wobbled dangerously to her feet, “I really must protest, you are scheduled to have at least four more hours of rest in order to-” 

“I will sleep when I’m dead,” she snapped, irritated beyond measure that the droid was bold enough to interrupt her while she was taking such a critically important call. “What is the response from the Dark Council?” she asked the woman on the comm instead. 

“Uncertain. We are waiting for confirmation from Darth Marr’s aides, as the Master of the Sphere of Military Defense, he will be first to respond to this crisis.”

“Nothing from Zhorrid?”

“No sir.”

Shara gestured impatiently to the droid, and with his help, she hobbled towards the refresher. “Send me Malgus’ speech. I want our analysts working on the broadcast, to see whether there’s any subliminal code being broadcast with it, or if Malgus has made it under duress. And send me a list of all known personnel in the region who can respond quickly.”

“I, ah...”

“Is there a problem, agent?”

“I- well, somewhat, sir. I’ve only recently been transferred from Logistics. I don’t know where to find those things.”

Shara closed her eyes, rubbing at the spot between her brows as she felt the pounding of the headache growing. “You are not an agent?”

“No, sir. My name is Katha Niar. Recent transfer to bump up the numbers after Corellia.”

She wondered how many recent transfers there’d been that she wasn’t aware of, and whether Watcher Two had signed off on it. She wondered if _she’d_ signed off on it, and in her exhausted delirium of the last few weeks, had simply forgotten it. “My apologies, Niar,” she said, reaching up to strip out of her sweat sodden bedclothes with shaking hands. “Have you called Watcher Two?”

“He responded to his alarm with a text response. He’s on his way now, sir.”

At least the damn fool had gotten some sleep. Better than nothing. “Once he arrives, get him to forward the details to me. I’ll be there as soon as I can, but he’ll still get there sooner.”

“Acknowledged sir.”

She grimaced as she leaned against the wall, fighting through a wave of dizziness. “That will be all, Niar.”

“Of course, sir, but if I may- what should I say if the Dark Council contacts us?”

“Say nothing,” she said, and disconnected the call.

There was a brief, blessed moment of silence, and then-

“Mistress.”

“Oh, shut up,” she snarled. “Help me get out of these bloody clothes and turn the water on for me.”

She couldn’t shower unsupervised these days- the risk of drowning if she lost consciousness was far too great- but she had grown used to the indignity of sitting helplessly in the little chair beneath the hot water while Em-Ay went through her ablutions for her. He hosed her down and lathered her hair with shampoo and tended to the various rashes and scaled patches on her skin where her body was struggling and failing against some various infection or irritant. She felt like a wretched, invalid waif, unable to even perform basic tasks for herself- and how was she supposed to be considered a viable resource for the empire when she couldn’t even take care of herself?

As promised, by the time she’d made it through the shower and limped back to the bedroom with assistance from Em-Ay, her datapad was flashing brightly with numerous unread updates. Em-Ay rather pointedly took it from her when she tried to read it naked, and with some snapping and snarling on both their parts, they managed to get her dressed into a freshly laundered uniform. 

She caught a glimpse of herself in a nearby surface, and tried not to wince. The same exhausted black circles under her eyes, the same sickeningly pale skin. Her hair looked dry and flat, like she could snap the strands in half if she reached up and scrunched her hand in it. She wouldn’t trust her with the security and intelligence of the empire- she probably wouldn’t trust her with the security of her own lunch. 

“Mistress?”

She glanced up, dismayed to realise she’d drifted off into her own thoughts; Em-Ay stood beside her with her coat, practically radiating disapproval. Shara sighed as she reached for her coat. “Please don’t, Em-Ay.”

“Mistress Jenn. I have been brought into your employ to see to your physical recovery, and yet despite my best efforts, you continue to engage in behaviours that exacerbate your symptoms and cause your further deterioration.”

“I _need_ to, Em-Ay,” she said, half frustrated and half desperate to make him understand. Droids were inherently logical, so if she could convince him, then surely that meant that her arguments were worthwhile? “I need to hold together Intelligence, to protect the Empire-”

“There are others who can perform your task adequately,” he said, and oh, that phrase cut straight through to the heart of her. It hurt in a way she couldn’t have imagined possibly, the brutal frankness with which he said it. “You have, in the last five days alone, experienced muscular degradation at such an accelerated rate that you will be functionally paraplegic within two months. No medical care I provide will be capable of preventing that, without offering cybernetic augmentation to compensate.”

She shrugged on her coat. “I will consider my options when we reach that point,” she said, her voice hoarse. Her hands were shaking, and she stuffed them in her pockets. 

“Mistress- with the prescribed level of care and rest, your quality of life would improve vastly, and it is entirely possible that you would not require-”

“What good is quality of life if I’m only going to be lying in a bed, alone and unnecessary?” she said, her voice rising in volume. “If I am not _necessary_ , if I am not worthwhile, then what is the point?”

Em-Ay did not respond immediately, and when he did, his answer was vastly disheartening. “Philosophical reasoning is not included in my programming.”

She lifted her chin. “It’s not philosophical. It’s my life.”

Saying that, she turned on her heel and marched towards the front door, picking up her datapad on her way past so that she could read it on the speeder ride over to headquarters. It was much as she’d heard in the first call- Malgus had declared himself Emperor, Malgus had collaborated with the Republic to undermine the Imperial presence on Ilum, Malgus had stolen an entire shipment of the immensely powerful kyber crystals. Stars above and below, how had he taken control of Emperor Vitiate’s space station so easily? She knew the Imperial Guard and the Emperor’s private consortium had been preoccupied since his grave confrontation with the Jedi Battlemaster several months ago, but to allow his personal sanctum to so easily be usurped by this pretender? Damn it, she _loathed_ sith power plays, what was to say that Malgus hadn’t simply been _allowed_ to take the space station, the easier to expose his petty schemes? 

How was she supposed to offer an adequate support network if they undermined themselves for the sake of their own egos? 

It was surprising to see the platform outside of Intelligence alive with activity for the first time in months, and somewhat heartening; if only the circumstances hadn’t been so grim. The guard on duty on the platform nodded in acknowledgement to her, and she was pleased to see that the puddles that had marred the entrance only a few days ago were nowhere to be seen today. 

Her head was spinning as she marched into the main hall, but she kept her chin up and her stride quick; she could hear shouting already, and she braced herself for the worst as she rounded the corner. 

She didn’t brace herself enough.

Darth Zhorrid stood before a woman she didn’t recognise, presumably the same woman she’d spoken to on the comms. Watcher Two, thank the stars, was also there, but Zhorrid seemed to have fixated on this Niar woman without a care for him at all.

Watcher Two spotted her first, a wave of relief washing over his face. “Keeper,” he began, raising a hand in greeting, and Zhorrid immediately spun in place to face her.

“Watcher!” she said, her voice almost a screech as she sped towards her; Shara did her best not to cringe. “Watcher, you must tell these people-”

“It’s Keeper, actually.”

Zhorrid waved her hands in frustration, almost like she was swatting at bugs. “The Keeper is in jail! He was taken away and is _gone_.”

“Yes, my lord, and I became Keeper in his place.”

She laughed shrilly, her face pulling an expression that made it abundantly clear that Zhorrid thought her quite mad. “You can’t take another man’s name,” she said, as if she was talking to a simpleton, “and especially not when he isn’t even dead.” Her amused expression dropped instantly, and her eyes widened. “Unless you’ve killed him. Oh, you’re going to ask me to kill him, aren’t you? I can do that, you know.”

Zhorrid’s fascination with and fear of male authority figures made it utterly impossible to deal with her on the best of days, and this was certainly not the best of days. “I know you are, my Lord, and I am eternally grateful,” she said, “but I do not need him killed, no.”

“Well, you can’t have his name if he’s not dead,” she said loftily. “Just like I couldn’t possibly have a seat on the Dark Council unless my father was dead. Which he is. He’s definitely dead, and he’s never coming back!”

“Was there something I could assist you with, my Lord?” Shara said loudly, trying to cut over the top of her without making it obvious that that was what she was doing. 

The Dark Lord’s demeanour changed instantly, the angry spitfire turning immediately to a hunched, cringing figure. “Vowrawn is angry, he’s very angry, and I don’t know what to do,” she said, wringing her hands together while she rocked in place ever so slightly. “The kyber crystals were supposed to be energy, he says, energy for the Empire, and now they’re gone, gone...”

Shara desperately did not want to deal with another of Darth Zhorrid’s tantrums right now- the woman was phenomenally powerful, that was unquestionable, but power alone should not merit her control of such a critical department. Again, it was a thought she could not voice aloud, because it was not her place to question or criticise the sith, especially not a Dark Council member. “We have alternative options that we are pursuing, my Lord,” she said, trying to steer her back to a more sensible state of mind. 

“Where is my favourite? My little blue one. She was always so good, so good, she could fix this, where is she?”

She bit her tongue. “Cipher Nine is not here at present,” she started to say, unsure of how to tell her that Cipher Nine was technically no longer an agent.

But Zhorrid was having none of it. “I want her here. Bring her to me. She can fix this, and she can make Vowrawn stop shouting, I don’t like the shouting!” 

Ironic that she was shouting just now. 

“My Lord, please,” she said. “We will fix this. Trust me.”

“I trust her! My blue favourite! Like a little blueberry, squish squish between my fingers-”

Emperor’s arse, did this woman have an off switch? “I will fetch her,” she said, already berating herself for a promise she knew she could not keep. “I will fetch her, and she will fix this, and all will be well.”

Watcher Two, seeming to gauge that the time was right for an interruption, stepped forward quickly. “Would you like me to have them summon your speeder, my Lord?” he asked sweetly, the cloying tone of his voice so overdone as to make her want to wince. He didn’t quite put his hands on her shoulders, but he somehow managed to steer her towards the exit without any effort. “We can have them bring it right around to the front door, out of the rain for you. We don’t want you to have to deal with the tedium of all the menial jobs we have to suffer through, it’s just not fitting for a Dark Lord of your calibre to have to deal with something so very far below your station, now, is it?”

“I’m on the Dark Council, I do not do menial tasks.”

“Of course not,” he said soothingly, their voices disappearing down the corridor. 

Silence hung in the hall for a moment, cringing and brittle, as if they were all waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Zhorrid to come storming back in, or for one of the other Dark Lords to appear in a swirl of smoke and lightning and irrational demands. When nothing manifested, when the silence stretched on, she felt the collective sigh of relief go through them all, the slumped shoulders, the thud of burgeoning headaches. 

She certainly experienced all three of them herself. 

But there wasn’t time for her personal weaknesses. “Status report,” she said crisply, and the room lurched into action around her. 

There was talk of an old Jedi fortress on the surface of Ilum, a place where Malgus’ troops were embedded deep. Reports were unconfirmed, but it was possible that Jedi Master Kylaena Dawnstar was leading the Republic push against the coup, and there was talk of offering a truce while the usurper was dealt with. It was a humiliating position for the Empire to find themselves in, and to beg the Republic for aid was excruciating- heads were going to roll, for sure, and the best thing she could do was assure herself that as little of the fallout would land on her people as possible. 

Whispers reached them at one point that the Dark Council had called for the Wrath, but there was no update as to whether the mysterious assassin had responded to the Empire’s pleas for help

Stars, their numbers were so thin on the ground that she had next to no one in the sector. Anyone she could send would be wasting critical hours in travel time. 

At some point in the morning, or evening, or whatever damnable hour it was now in this bleak and unforgiving edifice that seemed to swallow her days whole without ever letting her replenish herself, she found someone tapping her on the shoulder. Watcher Two stood beside her, and she could tell by the look on his face that he’d been attempting to gain her attention for some time now. She flushed, embarrassed at her lapse, but he simply nodded towards the privacy of her office. “Get some rest.” he murmured quietly, beneath the noise of the hall. “I’ll tell them all you’re in a meeting.” 

She wanted to protest, she truly did, but she was so, so tired. In the end, all she did was nod grimly, clutching her datapad to her like it was a shield as she marched into her office, the door hissing shut behind her. 

Shara made it to her desk, somehow, and slumped into the chair. She buried her face in her hands for a moment, fighting the overwhelming wave of hysterical grief and panic that was pushing up inside of her; her eyes burned, and her ribs ached from the force of holding in the sobs that writhed inside of her like a hurricane in her chest. It was all just so overwhelming, everything falling down around her like a house of cards... had it ever been like this when she’d just been a Watcher? Had it ever seemed this insurmountable, had it ever been this insurmountable, but they’d just... found ways around it?

Stars, but it was so agonisingly lonely, so terrifying. She wasn’t afraid of death, not really, but she was so paralysed by the fear of failure and insignificance, the possibility of being found not necessary. She had been specifically crafted to be a tool of the Empire, so what exactly was she supposed to be if that particular tool was no longer required? 

Her datapad, thrown haphazardly on her desk, beeped suddenly; that wasn’t that unusual, given the circumstances of the last few hours, but for some reason she glanced at it. And sat up sharply. 

The report blinking on the screen was registered to Rania Temple- _Thessa’s companion_ , her heart whispered- and for a brief, glorious moment, she allowed herself to believe that Cipher Nine was indeed coming home to save the day. That she had heard of their perils, and was racing to Dromund Kaas with all due haste, to march in with that stoic expression on her face and that quiet, calculating air to her, before she set about righting all the wrongs that had occurred in her absence. 

Her stomach lurched miserably when she opened the file and found that that was not the case at all; she cursed herself for the whimsy of the daydream, even if it had only been brief. But then, rubbing her eyes to make sure that she was not seeing double, she began to take in the actual data in the report, and realised she was holding the answer to all of their prayers. 

A potential power source unseen in the galaxy prior to now? The potential to nullify the power and influence that the Hutt riches had, as a banking resource and a buyer for the Republic’s sluggish economy? Proof that Imperial Intelligence was not dead in the water after all, and that they still had the tenacity and the wit to serve and save the Empire? 

With shaking hands, she started to pull up the regional charts for this planet- Makeb, their salvation was going to be on Makeb- and sent a general request for all registered agents within the nearby sectors...

... only for Cipher Nine’s profile to appear at the top of the list, prominently placed, and conveniently located only a few sectors over from Makeb. 

Cipher Nine had been decommissioned. She’d- she knew that, they all knew that. She’d all but begged, by some accounts, to be given the freedom to walk away. The Minister had made her that promise before he’d been taken away by the sith, and she’d held to that promise even though it had killed her. And yet here she was, listed as the most valuable and sensible asset to use for any sort of mission in the area. 

Was it some sort of trick? She immediately rebooted her firewalls, the clicker on her belt chirping as it issued new access codes to all of her files and consoles. She couldn’t necessarily say she’d put it past the SIS to try slicing into their databanks, and certainly whilst a coup was in progress they would not face the opposition they might normally. But everything reconnected within seconds with no signs of tampering, and Cipher Nine appeared again at the top of the list.

Glancing around, as if expecting to see a sith lurking in the corner laughing at her, she finally clicked on the tab, holding her breath. 

_Cipher Designation: Nine._

_Status: Active._

_Active operations: None._

_Active enquiries: None._

_Additional: Actions pending._

Actions pending? What did that mean? There was an attachment in the folder, and she clicked through- only for her stomach to lurch down into her boots. 

It was Thessa’s decommission request, the formal written one, and at the bottom the form was a blank square, unsigned. It had the Minister’s name attached, but the space requiring his signature sat empty. Cipher Nine had never officially been decommissioned. Her resignation had never been formally approved. 

_She was still an agent._

She could call her right now, and order her in, and have her back here to help her within-

“Stop it,” she growled under her breath, blinking away tears as she slammed the datapad down on the desk. She still had her honour, if nothing else, and she would not betray Cipher Nine’s trust and confidence in her by acting duplicitously. 

Although...

Darth Zhorrid had made it abundantly clear that she favoured Cipher Nine- and perhaps that would work in their favour as a whole when it came time to formalise their requests for funding and resources. And Zhorrid was hardly going to allow her to just sign off on the resignation of one of their best assets, regardless of whether she was infatuated with her or not. The woman might have been unbearable in many ways, but she had her moments of lucidity, and even she was not stupid enough to let their greatest agent simply walk away. 

And it wasn’t like she’d be the one breaking the promise to Thessa... the negotiation had taken place without her present, and she had no idea what the terms of the agreement were that she and James had come to. 

And what was to say that she couldn’t just feign ignorance? Say that she’d never realised that James had meant a permanent severance and not simply... a vacation? The lie tasted foul even just in her thoughts, and her stomach roiled. But the thought of having Thessa on hand, the thought that maybe the infamous Cipher Nine might return to them, to be a voice of reason and a silent beacon in the darkness...

She closed the tab. 

She left the request pending. 

Cipher Nine didn’t have to know just yet.


	9. Second Trial

_Dromund Kaas, the Dromund System, Outer Rim Territories_

The air space above Dromund Kaas was crowded as always, the system full of cruisers and destroyers and the massive, circular space station with the docking ports jutting out like spears into the black sky. There were, however, some noticeable absences- Darth Marr’s personal flagship among them. She’d seen the reports coming through regarding the coup attempt on Ilum, or at least those disseminated for Imperial citizens by the Dark Council, which were heavily watered down and light on details and very heavy on the loyalist rhetoric; propaganda, essentially. Everything is fine, nothing is wrong, the glorious Empire will rule for a thousand generation, and so on and so on. It was not their best work, and Thessa had to wonder how who was still left in the Imperial Publicity Department, the division of Intelligence that had once dealt with propaganda. 

Thake had forwarded her the internal communication that he’d received from the Expansionary Defence Force, breaking any number of protocols in doing so, but that was simply his way. She was grateful, because the Chiss were far more frank in their discussion of the uprising, brutally scathing in their disdain. The fact that the coup had occurred at all was an almost unforgivable weakness, as far as the Ascendancy was concerned, but the fact that it had happened practically on their doorstep? That the Empire had allowed this rot to fester and explode so close to the sovereign territories of the Chiss? 

Completely and utterly unacceptable. The cracks in the relationship with the Empire ran deep, and it would take intense work to see it adequately repaired- and she did not think the Empire had the humility to admit to such failings. 

What would become of individuals like herself, if the Ascendancy chose to withdraw from their alliance with the Empire? The Council of Ruling Families had very pointedly looked the other way at the torture she had endured, the brainwashing; she was technically not an Imperial citizen, and what was only barely tolerable conduct in an alliance was most assuredly not acceptable outside of it. And that wasn’t even taking into consideration the-

Thessa shook herself, rubbing wearily at her eyes. She was getting ahead of herself. The Ascendancy had not dissolved the mutual defence pact with the Empire, nor had they given any indication that such a decision was imminent. They were unhappy, yes, but that did not mean they were going to take such a drastic step. Certainly they weren’t going to do anything just because Imperial Intelligence had brainwashed her- 

“Something on your mind?”

She blinked, and glanced to where Raina sat in the navigator’s seat. “It’s nothing,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. 

“Oh.” The sound was awkward, as if Raina had only just remembered once again that Thessa had drawn a line in the snow, and that she had stepped over it. Really, her reluctance to talk right now had nothing to do with the fact that Raina was pushing ahead with her life in Intelligence, and was more because she didn’t really want to try and explain the spiralling anxious nature of her thoughts. “Well, I mean, if you want to talk-”

“It’s fine, Raina.”

“... alright.”

It was bitterly uncomfortable, but what else could she say? No, Raina, it’s alright, I’m not thinking about you prioritising a career over anything we might have been building together, I’m only wondering whether my people are going to dissolve an alliance and put me in the painful position of being a liability for both governments? No, Raina, it’s fine, I’m not angry at you for killing your father, but I am still disappointed, but I’m rather more preoccupied with wondering about the safety of my own child right now?

So she said nothing instead. 

“Phantom, this is Kaas City Air Control, please transmit your clearance codes for landing.”

Thessa leaned forward, going through the motions just so that she had something to distract herself with. “Phantom here, transmitting now,” she said.

“Standby.” There was a moment of silence, as the flight officer on the other end of the connection verified their military clearance. “Phantom, you are cleared for landing, please proceed to Landing Bay Four Seven Nine of Terminal Nineteen.”

“Copy that, Kaas City.”

“Please be advised that you are entering restricted military airspace, and you are to required to operate within the altitude and velocity restrictions set by the Ministry of Defence. All passengers will be required to submit for processing by customs officers. Any unregistered passengers will be terminated.”

It had been some time since she’d stopped to think about how bleakly terrifying the warning message was, but in all honesty, it was completely in keeping with Imperial policies and the current political climate. The new Jedi Battlemaster had all but walked into Kaas City unopposed, and had destroyed a part of the irreplaceable history of their city when she’d brought down the Dark Temple in her confrontation with Emperor Vitiate. Malgus had just declared a coup, and any number of Imperial citizens could have been a new threat to the capital, while still appearing under the guise of a legal visitor. It was not so many months ago now that a Mandalorian bounty hunter, proving true to their people’s reputation for bloodthirst, had walked directly into the private chambers on Darth Tormen’s flagship and assassinated him, dangerously jeopardising the pact with the Mandalore. It was completely normal protocol, as far as the Empire was concerned, to threaten citizens with death, and really if one was to consider the events of the last half year or so, it was positively mundane compared to what could have been the official response. 

But everything went smoothly, the landing taking place without a hitch; she and Raina were an excellent team at the controls of the Phantom, after all, and regardless of how awkward things were between them, they were still professionals. Likewise, the customs officers were rather brisk, and perhaps it helped that they no longer had Thake or Kaliyo on board- well, not for the moment, anyway- but they were certainly moved through with greater haste than she was used to, even at the peak of her influence as an agent. 

It was balmy as they made their way out of the air conditioned spaceport, the clouds bruised and cast with undertones of red from the setting sun. The concrete walkways were shining wet from the afternoon’s downpours, and the jungle outside was alive with the creatures of the evening, the insects screaming in a horrifying cadence loud enough to make conversation difficult at times. 

Scorpio had elected to remain behind on the ship, as always, which left Thessa and Raina with Vector and Lokin; nobody really spoke as they made their way through the spaceport, and as they reached the city shuttle pad, the awkwardness seemed almost unbearable. Lokin seemed to be the one to take pity on the two women, and he cleared his throat. “I suspect that you’ll want to get settled and get some rest after the flight,” he said loudly, addressing the statement to Thessa. “I’ll see that Miss Temple makes it safely to Intelligence headquarters, if you’d like to go home first.” 

Thessa glanced at Vector. “I mean, I was hoping to get my resignation finalised,” she said slowly. “I haven’t received my severance pay, or my documentation...”

“They are remarkably short staffed at the moment,” Lokin said. “I think you’ll find it’s simply just a lack of resources on their part.”

“We can take you over in the morning, love,” Vector said softly, reaching over and taking her hand in his. “We would very much like to go home, and see you comfortable for the evening.”

She smiled at him. “Thank you, love,” she said. “I just want this chapter of my life to be over.”

It was impossible to miss the way Raina’s body language changed, the hunched way she stood, as if the words were a physical blow to her. Thessa gritted her teeth, and did her best to ignore it; she wasn’t going to be guilted into this by a woman who couldn’t let her down off of a pedestal. 

Lokin waved them off. “Get yourselves to an early bed,” he said. “I’ve reports of my own to file, so I don’t particularly mind the stop downtown. I’ve questions about the funding of certain branches of Intelligence, now that the Cabal is well and truly dealt with.”

They parted ways there, with Lokin and Raina taking a shuttle downtown towards the grand tower in the centre of the business district, that dominated the Kaas City skyline like a jagged, man-made mountain. Thessa had never liked working there. Thankfully, instead of following them, she and Vector took a private speeder towards home, a pleasant little apartment that sat on the border of the Csillan Quarter- close enough that the comforts of home were near at hand, but not so close that the reminders were overwhelming. The ride took a good forty-five minutes, soaring over the jungle and then getting caught in the busy dinner-time traffic; she closed her eyes and leaned up against Vector, enjoying both the warmth of his arm around her and the muggy cold of the evening air whipping over them. 

Their apartment complex had a droid serving as a doorman, and he appeared without fail to take their bags when the speeder set them down on the landing platform. The lights of the city were like diamonds set against the backdrop of the jungle, and in places where parks had been encouraged to grow, the jungle tried to take back the land that had been stolen from it; the city felt wild and alive and pulsing, in a way that never quite seemed comfortable. The windows were fogged with condensation when they entered, the lights slowly coming to life in response to their movement. 

“It is good to be home,” Vector said, and it was. 

Strange, how she wasn’t entirely sure what counted as home, but now that she was standing in this small apartment with him, somehow she knew with more surety. She might not want to raise their child in the Empire, but she also wasn’t sure she wanted to raise their child in the Ascendancy. All she knew for sure was that she wanted him there, and she wanted to be a family. She wanted to be safe. 

“I think I’m going to run a bath,” she said, rubbing slowly at her lower back. She wasn’t at the stage where the pregnancy was putting any undue pressure on her back muscles, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still tired. “Will you start the sweep for me?” 

“Of course. Would you like us to order something for dinner?” 

She smiled tiredly at him as he came over and kissed her on the forehead. “That would be lovely, thank you.” 

They pottered about the apartment, she running the bath and slowly stripping off pieces of her clothing as she alternated between unpacking and checking on the water, and he going room to room with a signal disruptor and a miniaturised EMP device to track and disable any listening bugs that might have been planted in their absence. They generally found five or six each time they returned from a mission, and she was never quite sure whether it was Imperial Intelligence planting them to keep track of their own agents, or whether it was an agent of the Republic. She used to wonder whether or not it was the Star Cabal, and the thought of any of their agents walking unhindered into the sanctuary of her home still made her skin crawl, even knowing they were gone. It could very well have been any number of private agencies too, because the Cabal had most assuredly not been the only terror cell in existence. 

Regardless, she never slept easy until they’d deloused the apartment, so to speak. 

There was music drifting on the night time air, something loud and uniquely chiss in origin, probably originating from the Csillan Quarter; she left the balcony door open, activating the privacy shield to stop insects and eavesdroppers, and then finished stripping off the last of her clothes as she made her way to the refresher. The bathtub was made of dark stone, and it was deep enough that when she sat down, the water came up to her chin. She closed her eyes, and let herself relax. 

Vector came in at one point, setting down a mug of tea on the stone edge of the bath. She smiled sleepily at him, and he chuckled, dragging over a small stool to join her. “Are you adequately settled now?” he teased gently.

“Very much so,” she said lazily. 

“Would you like us to join you?”

“Mm, I wouldn’t mind.” 

He stood up, as if to begin disrobing, and the front door chimed. They laughed together. “We had best see to that,” he said, a tad reluctantly. “We think it is our dinner.”

He crossed the room and left, and Thessa pushed herself off the bottom of the tub to float over to the other side, trying to peer around the doorframe as the water sloshed noisily. “Can you bring mine in here?” she called. “I don’t want it to go cold.” 

Vector didn’t answer immediately. 

“Love?”

He reappeared in the doorway, and he did not have their food. “We think perhaps you’d best come out here, love,” he said, and there was a hesitance in his voice that frightened her. It was resigned, the same sort of tone he’d had in the last few months when they’d been outwitted by Hunter at every single turn. “We will fetch your robe for you.”

“Vector? What’s going on?”

He took a breath, as if to say something, but then thought better of it; instead he turned away, going back to their bedroom presumably in search of her bathrobe. 

That was more frightening than it had a right to be- but Vector was a diplomat. He was supposed to be a man defined by his ability to craft his words into something powerful and beautiful. Even when his words were sparse, they were chosen with care and deliberation, and the slow cadence when he spoke was one of the most gentle pieces of music she had ever heard. To see him speechless, literally walking away with his mouth hanging open?

She could hear the crack in the ice, but she did not know where it was safe to place her feet. 

With great hesitance, she climbed out of the still warm bath, reaching for her towel slowly; she was almost done by the time he returned, and he held the robe open for her, wrapping it around her securely. He kissed her on the forehead again, holding her tighter this time. 

“Vector,” she whispered, “you’re frightening me.”

“We are sorry,” he said quietly, “and we are sorry that this is how our evening must evolve.”

Saying that, he took her hand and led her carefully from the room, out through their bedroom and down the hallway, and down to the little room that sat off of the living area. She had thought perhaps to turn it into a nursery, now that things were settling down and she had the time to devote to such a task. Now, however, it was her office, and it was here that she found-

Thessa blinked. “Raina?” she asked, bewildered. 

Raina was slumped at her desk, her shoulders shaking, and as Thessa spoke, she looked up- her eyes were puffy and red, and she’d obviously been crying for some time. “I’m sorry,” she said hoarsely. 

“Raina? Darling? Sorry for what?” She clutched her robe tighter, panic slowly building in her veins. “What have you done?” 

“I’m such a fool,” she said, hiccuping on the words. “I’m so stupid to think I could fix it-”

“ _Raina_.”

“They know about me,” Raina said, half sobbing. “They- they know. That there’s a Force user, I mean. Or they- they suspect, I don’t know. But I- I need to be tested, we all need to be tested, and I just...”

_I killed my father for nothing._

The words hung in the air between them, ugly and jagged and miserable, and Thessa felt them stick in her throat. 

“I’m sorry,” Raina whispered, “I didn’t know where else to go.”

Her answer was on her tongue before she could stop herself. “The ability to think on one’s feet when emotionally compromised is a critical skill for any agent who wants to remain living,” she said. 

Raina’s soft gasp cut right through her, and she even heard Vector make a small noise of surprise at the cold nature of her response. She didn’t even know where the callous remark had come from, only that it was there, and there was no taking it back. And really, she had explicitly explained to Raina that she had no intention of staying with Intelligence- for her to come to her now, with a problem that was unquestionably something for an agent to deal with, not a civilian, was beyond cruel. It was selfish. 

Thessa walked out of the room, her head reeling. Vector might have called out to her, she wasn’t sure; in a daze, she made her way out to the balcony, the heat of the evening welcoming her just like the steam from the refresher. She grasped the railing firmly, and she wasn’t sure if it was to stop herself from throwing a fit and lashing out at the darkness, or to keep her upright as her head kept spinning. 

She could have argued that she’d never had any knowledge of Raina’s Force sensitivity, possibly, if she’d been feeling particularly cruel. But not now. Not now that she’d run straight to her home, and stars only knew how many people had seen her crying as she’d entered. 

She couldn’t hide this. And Raina seemed incapable of fixing it, and arguably her own botched attempts to deal with it had only exacerbated the situation. Now she had to fix it, or the wrath of the Sith would come down on all of them. 

... the wrath of the Sith...

She sniffed, unaware of the fact that she’d also been crying; she wiped at her face with the back of her sleeve, and she laughed almost hysterically. Of course it fell to her to fix things. It was almost stupid, how they’d made her a Cipher, given how often she was called on to fix the problems of everyone else. 

Should’ve been a Fixer, after all. 

And if she couldn’t fix the problem- that is, if she couldn’t make it go unnoticed, smooth things over as if it had never happened in the first place- then the obvious choice would be to defend their position. Find allies, solidify their stance, defy anyone who might call them into question. She was _Cipher Nine_ , for crying out loud- she had held this damned Empire back from the brink of destruction with her own bloodied hands. 

If they couldn’t hide the fact that Raina was Force sensitive, then maybe they needed to not hide it anymore. 

“Love?” She heard footsteps on the polished stone of the balcony, and she felt Vector’s hand on the small of her back. “Please come back inside.” 

She sniffed again, shaking her head absently. “Is dinner here?” 

“Not yet, but... Thessa, please. We don’t want you to catch cold.”

She laughed. “Chiss can’t catch cold,” she said, but even as she said it, she was straightening again, pushing off the wall and turning around. “Is Raina still here?”

“Yes. We have settled her in the guest bedroom for now, to rest.”

“Good.” She reached into herself and found the cold hard edge of the woman who was Cipher Nine, a woman she thought she’d let go of for good. “I need to call Thake. I need him to get in contact with the Wrath.”


	10. The Dark Lords

_Dromund Kaas, the Dromund System, Outer Rim Territories_

Shara paced nervously in her office, unbearably anxious about the upcoming meeting. With the crisis on Ilum drawing to a close, from all the reports coming through, the Dark Council was out for blood. The energy crisis had only worsened as a result of the lost resources on Ilum, and they had lost a substantial number of soldiers and vessels too; granted, a good number of the defectors to Malgus’ coup had been aliens, and as far as the Empire was concerned that was good riddance to bad rubbish, but there were still plenty of humans amongst their ranks, and plenty of high ranking sith lords. They had lost dozens of starships trying to contain the tremendously overpowered stealth armada, and what should have been an easy victory for the empire had devolved into a humiliation that far oustripped the failures of Corellia. 

They had gambled on a safe triumph, and new energy resources to power the faltering imperial needs, and instead had crippled themselves. 

Now she had to navigate the treacherous waters of sith egos, and multiple at once at that. Her earlier claims that an agent had found a potential energy source that could solve all of the empire’s problems was not as warmly welcomed as it might have been a week ago, and instead the Dark Council seemed determined to twist and turn this discovery until it spat out whatever sinister motives they suspected it to have. She hoped that above all else, this did not require twisting and turning of her own self- she had never been called upon to address the Dark Council in full, and she was miserably stressed that she had to do so for the first time under such inauspicious circumstances. 

Someone cleared their throat behind her, and she spun on her heel to find a young woman standing in the doorway, a quizzical look on her face. Temple, this was Agent Temple, of course. Nothing to be worried about there. 

She attempted a wan smile, reaching up anxiously to push an imagined hair back out of her eyes. “My apologies, agent,” she said, “I didn’t hear you come in.”

Temple’s eyes widened. “Oh no, no please, it was my mistake,” she said, looking somewhat distressed. “I knocked, and then you didn’t answer, so I knocked again, and then I thought I heard you, so I came in, but then you clearly hadn’t heard me, and then-”

Shara held up a hand. “Easy, easy Temple,” she said wearily. “It’s fine.”

She still looked embarrassed. “My sincerest apologies, sir.”

“We are not getting off to a good start for the day ahead if we’re both to be stumbling over one another with apologies,” she said, smoothing her hands down the front of her jacket. Swallowing down her nerves as best she could, she held out a hand to her, crossing the distance to her. “Let’s start fresh. It’s good to see you, Agent Temple.”

This close, she could see the carefully applied darker line around the edge of her purple lipstick, and the way her short, tightly coiled hair was pinned back from her face as if to suggest it was longer than she wore it. Her grip, when she took the proffered hand, was enthusiastically firm, and Shara had to fight back the grimace at the mild flare of pain in her joints. “It’s an honour to be here, sir,” Temple said, and if nothing else, her puppy like excitement was enough to make her smile halfheartedly in return. It had been a very long time since they’d had someone excited to be in Imperial Intelligence. 

Or rather, Sith Intelligence. She had to get used to saying that now. They were Sith Intelligence now. 

“I, um...” She waved distractedly, as if trying to dismiss an errant thought. “I apologise for not being here last night to greet you in person.” 

“Oh! That’s not necessary, sir.”

“You could very well have saved the agency with what you’ve uncovered for us,” she said, noting the way she flinched ever so slightly and filing it away for later analysis. “And from what I’ve read of Fixer Fifteen’s report, you performed admirably in the field. Even without the added bonus of the Makeb files, you’ve well and truly earned the rank of Cipher, if you so desire it.” 

The way her eyes lit up was startlingly breathtaking, and Shara almost had to shake herself, puzzled by her response. Temple was an attractive young woman, of course, but such a response was hardly appropriate. “I cannot tell you what an honour that would be, sir,” she said. 

Shara smiled at her. “You seem to find honour in everything, Temple.”

“Oh! I can, um, I can stop-”

“No, no,” she said, still smiling as she held her hand up to silence her protests. “It’s refreshing, to have someone so enthusiastic. It’s been some time since we’ve had any smiles around here.”

Temple nodded fervently. “I can well imagine, sir.”

“I’ve gone through and pulled all the available Cipher titles,” she said, going over to her desk and collecting a datapad from the top drawer. “There’s a few that we can’t confirm just yet as officially returned, but hopefully in the coming weeks, if the Council allows us resources and funding again, we’ll be able to move forward in re-establishing ourselves.” She handed her the datapad. “You can expect to be instrumental in that process, but of course, we can hardly expect you to undertake field work without a title.”

Again, her face lit up with excitement, as if she’d just been gifted the keys to a candy store, and not a list that was almost entirely made up of dead agents designations. “I can pick my own?” she said, as if she scarcely believed it. 

Shara nodded, trying to ignore that yet again, Temple’s unbridled joy made something within her twist. She couldn’t place the emotion, the feeling it evoked, but it unnerved her. Even more so when Temple bit her lip, as if in concentration. 

Shara looked away. 

“Is it...” Temple’s hesitance forced her to look back, but she steeled herself first. “Is it terribly improper if I was to say I wanted Cipher Three?”

“Why would that be improper?”

Raina’s expression faltered for a moment, curiously miserable before she hid it again. “Because... because I investigated his death, of course,” she said. “Seems sort of macabre.” 

“Nonsense. It’s practically a workplace necessity, to expect the macabre around here.” She took back the datapad, tucking it under her arm. “In that case, it is my pleasure to declare you, Raina Temple, to be now known as Cipher Three of Sith Intelligence. Your files will be updated accordingly.”

Raina’s smile was tentative, as if she was fighting not to cringe. “Thank you so much, sir,” she said. “Keeper, I mean, I should be calling you Keeper.”

Shara patted her awkwardly on the shoulder before returning the datapad to her desk. “It’s quite alright,” she said, straightening again with some difficulty. She already felt weary, and she hadn’t even met with the Council. “Now then- I am expected with the Dark Council, so if you will excuse me?” 

Her uniform was immaculate, even if the stiffness of the fabric was a sensory nightmare for her, rubbing and chafing as if it was determined to rub her skin off as she walked. But she refused to limp, or let her shoulders drop; she would not let them see her exhaustion, her pain. She would not give them anything to use against her, either to mock her or to offer up as proof of her uselessness as Keeper. 

The Dark Council met on Korriban, in the holy chambers of old, a blessed and reverent place that no one lacking in Force powers save the Imperial Guard themselves were allowed to trespass. However, they did have a sanctum here in Kaas City, a facility that served them when their business took them to the capital of the Empire, and it was to this location that she turned her footsteps towards. 

There was a brisk rain shower outside, the morning cold but humid, and she strode quickly down the walkway from Sith Intelligence to the sanctum entrance; the Imperial Guards on duty at the entrance paid her no heed, but she still felt the weight of their regard, as they assessed the threat she posed in unacknowledged silence. The roof rose away to unbearable heights, and the floor fell away to nauseating depths, while stylistic monuments of cowled, faceless men stood in ever silent vigil. Her footsteps echoed as she crossed the platforms hanging over the abyss, chin held high but eyes kept lowered so as not to seem a challenge to any sith she encountered. There were more Imperial guard, their uniforms starkly red and their helmets blank. She could hear the crackle of uncontrolled electricity somewhere in the depths, and the occasional scream- she could not tell if it was in pain or in ecstasy. 

It could very well have been both. 

She paused before the doors to the Council chambers, still closed tight to deter any visitors. She glanced at her chrono, to make certain for the upteenth time that she was not late, but also not early- it was as great an insult to a Sith to arrive before they were prepared for you, as it was to waste their time and arrive well past the scheduled time. After a minute or so of standing to attention, the vast doors finally cracked down the middle, slowly opening inwards towards the chamber. She held her breath, not sure what to expect from this point on.

A rather normal looking blonde woman appeared in the portal, her eyes the sharp gold of a sith, and her black and green attire positively mundane compared to some of the more extravagant ensembles worn by the Dark Lords. She looked her over once, her expression unreadable but cool. “Keeper?” she said, her accent crisp and clear. 

Shara nodded her head. “My lord,” she said courteously. 

The woman pursed her lips, and Shara tried not to take that as a bad sign. “The Dark Council will see you now,” she said, stepping aside and allowing her to enter. 

The chamber beyond was nowhere near as impressive as the one on Korriban was rumoured to be, but it was still daunting. The room was ringed with twelve chairs- six on her left, and six on her right-, and directly opposite the door stood another of the statues, but smaller in scale than the looming, faceless edifices. This one was clearly meant as a stand in for the Emperor himself, and it made her skin crawl to look at the finer details in the features. 

She had her instructions, both from the former Minister himself and from the aides to the Dark Council who had sent her etiquette guides prior to this meeting- she was, at all times, to address the statue of the Emperor, regardless of who had spoken to her. If she ever turned to speak to one of the Dark Council, she would be turning her back on six of their members, and that was an unforgivable insult beyond comprehension. Face forward, never make eye contact, and never turn your back on the Dark Lords. 

Every single chair had an occupant, and more than one of them had an attendant standing to one side, like an assistant or a guardian, as laughable a concept as it was for one of the Dark Lords to require a guardian. A good half of them were not physically present in the chamber, but instead were projecting their image via hololink; Darth Marr and Darth Ravage were of course in the process of travelling back from Ilum, but they were hardly the only ones not physically in attendance. It did little to assuage her nerves, because a Dark Lord in a holo was hardly less intimidating than one in the flesh. 

She walked into the centre of the chamber and dropped to one knee, her head bowed towards her chest as she placed a balancing hand on the ground beside her. She stayed there, in absurd genuflection, waiting for the command that her presence would be tolerated. 

“Rise, Keeper,” came a deep voice, and she couldn’t say which Lord had spoken. 

She closed her eyes and breathed out slowly, rising to her feet and keeping her gaze towards the front; she was not Force sensitive, but even without the Force as a guide, it was impossible to miss the power in the room. The sheer weight of it pressed down on her, like a hundred thousand grabbing hands the wanted to tug at her hair and drag at her clothing and whisper incomprehensible things into her ears in a voice that made her want to scream. To be in the presence of a single Dark Lord was an honour and a horror- to be in the presence of all twelve was a waking nightmare. 

“You have news for us.”

Shara nodded, her heart pounding in her ears; already she could feel sweat beading on her spine beneath her uniform, and her thighs beginning to tremble from the effort of keeping her upright without support. “That is correct, my Lord.” 

There was a stirring in the darkness to her left, and she fought the instinct to look- the instinct of a prey animal- with everything in her. “Makeb,” came another voice, lighter, but no less cruel. “Your predecessor brought us news of this planet some time ago.” 

That was not a good start, having them mention the Minister so early on. “He offered rumours,” she said, willing her voice not to tremble. In front of her, the cold stone statue of the Emperor offered no comfort. “I bring facts.” 

“Interesting,” came yet a third voice. “And tell us, Keeper- how is it that you have managed to ascertain these _facts_ , when your agency lacks a Minister, and cohesive leadership, and was in fact completely useless in preempting the betrayal of Malgus?”

Shara stared desperately ahead, trying to stop herself from shaking. “I...”

“Oh, shut up Aruk.” There was a murmur of dissent in the chamber, and more than one stifled chuckle. “You want to insult Zhorrid? Insult her, not the help, she’s right here-”

“I am right here! That’s right!” There was a flurry of movement off to her right, as if someone had launched themselves to their feet from their throne. “I will not be spoken to in such a manner!” 

“I would think you would be used to it, my dear.’’

Shara closed her eyes, frantically praying that they would let her go before their bickering turned violent. 

“I for one would like to know more about these Makeb files,” someone said loudly, their voice distorted by a mask. There was more than one Council member in a mask, their features obscured, so she could not say which one of them it was taking pity on her. “The adegan crystals procured on Ilum will only sustain us for so long- without access to long term mining facilities, our supply will burn up within a year, perhaps two.”

“I did not realise that you were head of the Sphere of Logistics now, Imperius,” someone said snidely. 

“If you will not do your job, Vowrawn, then I will see it done.”

“ _Enough_.” The next speaker had a voice that rattled with brutal cold, and she bit back her whimper at the last second. “Your petty bickering disgraces us all- and shows how easily Malgus took advantage of us in the first place.”

“I for one have never let a man take advantage of me,” purred another speaker, voice husky and crawling with promise that seemed at once sexual and murderous. 

“What,” said another voice, speaking over the top of the previous, “is the nature of this power source on Makeb, Keeper?”

Finally. She licked dry lips. “Unclear, my Lord. Our agent’s death interrupted our investigation, and we are still working to decrypt the necessary files. We do believe the energy source to be of a radioactive nature, however, due to the equipment being listed in the purchase manifests by the mining company hired by the Hutt Cartel, including significant quantities of xenon-132, which is used as a fast acting neutron absorber in instances of potentially volatile radioactive isotopes.” 

“And what are its capabilities, that we should consider this information of such high priority.”

“Our reports are unverified by independent testing of our own, but the Cartel’s science team alleges that the power source is so powerful that a single microgram could power a datapad for a century, if not longer. We have been unable to completely decrypt any files with more extensive scientific testing provided by our agent, but initial reports indicate the half-life of the power source to be extensive.”

There was a shifting in the darkness, as the Dark Council seemed to consider her words. “What on earth are the Hutts doing to have found this?” someone asked. “Why not simply sell it off immediately for profit?”

Shara took a deep breath. “Preliminary reports seem to imply that they are attempting to weaponise it, my Lord.” She wondered if they could hear her heart racing; she could barely hear herself think over the top of it. “I have prepared a dossier, which I will forward with your permission to each of your offices, and your relevant ministries-”

“That will not be necessary.” 

She felt a surge of panic within her, and she swallowed with difficulty. “My Lord?”

“If the Hutts are indeed working towards militarisation, we cannot have word of this reaching the populace.” She was fairly certain now that the speaker was Darth Marr, but she still dared not look. “Not with the scars of Ilum still so fresh.”

“Agreed,” came another male speaker. “We can work in secret to counter and undermine the Hutts. The greater their greed, the greater their humiliation when they inevitably fail.”

“And there is nothing so vast as a Hutt’s greed.”

This brought a round of laughter in the chamber, nasty and conniving. It made her skin crawl, even as relief sank into her body. They weren’t going to punish her. They were satisfied. 

“What do you require to adequately serve us, Keeper?” came a female voice, brusque and clipped. “What is necessary to avoid the failures of Ilum?”

Not entirely satisfied, then. “We need funding,” she said, before she could stop herself. “We have lost manpower, resources-”

“ _Every_ department has lost manpower and resources in this last year,” someone said bluntly. “First on Corellia, and now on Ilum. Why should you be worthy of our special attention?” 

“We have no minister to petition for our needs,” she said, her voice barely rising above a whisper. She was staring so hard at the statue of the Emperor that her eyes were watering. “We have no one to speak for us, so I must beg, please. Let us serve again, as we should.”

There was silence.

And then-

“Why is there no Minister, Zhorrid?” a female speaker asked. She tried to count off on the members of the Council it could have been. Acina. Nox. Obcaecus. Zhorrid herself, whose voice she knew. Which one of them would possibly stand up for her and her faltering department? “Intelligence is your Sphere, and you demand at all turns that we take you seriously- why then, have you not promoted someone to the ministry, to oversee the administration?” 

Zhorrid hissed quite loudly. “What is this, a witch hunt? Malgus outwitted Regus, the mundane, not I! I am not responsible for the wretched mess with Ilum!” 

“Shut up, Zhorrid.” 

Shara bit her tongue, and did not speak. She had no idea if they still wanted her here, or if she had overstayed her welcome. 

“My favourite could be the Minister,” Zhorrid said, apparently determined not to be dissuaded. “She is far more clever than this one, far better, she’s my favourite. Bring her here! I will make her the minister!” 

“To whom is she referring with her inane prattling?” someone asked.

May her soul find mercy for her next words. “She is referring to the agent known as Cipher Nine,” Shara said quietly, her stomach twisting bitterly. “Cipher Nine was the one-”

“The one who defied Jadus, yes.” The air in the chamber turned sharp, almost electric. “This agent still lives?” 

There was no softness in the stone visage of the Emperor, no comfort to be found. “She does,” she whispered. 

There was a shifting in the room, as if they were exchanging glances outside the range of her vision. “Continue with this investigation, Keeper,” someone said finally, she suspected Darth Marr. “Find us the evidence to justify our involvement, and to undermine the Cartel’s power base, and you shall have your funding.” 

“And bring us Cipher Nine,” said another. “We will determine if she is appropriate for the ministry.”


End file.
